Clinical features of autism spectrum disorders

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The proposed project will utilize data from the Norwegian Mother and Child Cohort (MoBa) and the Autism Birth Cohort (ABC) to investigate clinical features of autism spectrum disorders. MoBa is a pregnancy cohort started by the Norwegian Institute of Pu blic Health (NIPH). The ABC study is a case-control study of autism spectrum disorder nested within the MoBa cohort. The ABC study is financed by a grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) / National Institutes of Neurological Disorders and Stro ke (NINDS) in the United States, and run in collaboration between NIPH and Columbia University in New York. The ABC study is one of the first studies in the world to implement large-scale population-based screening for ASD and to use standardized diagnos tic tools and psychometric testing in the follow-up of the children undergoing screening. The project will provide new knowledge about the performance of standardized diagnostic tools (ADI-R and ADOS) in population-based samples. It will also expand our understanding of cognitive characteristics of children with ASD. The phenotypic variations within the autism spectrum are still insufficiently studied and described. Increased knowledge of cognitive deficits in ASD is crucial, because cognitive deficits m ay point towards causal pathways in ASD, and because cognitive skills may be predictive of outcomes later in life. The application includes a request for funding of clinical assessments in the ABC study for one year beyond the expiry of the NIH/NINDS gr ant on May 31st, 2010 (research objective 1) and for two doctoral fellowships, one for each of research objectives 2 and 3.