[kpil]

5 % is quite a lot of misdiagnosed babies if this is implemented as a mass screening activity, 2-3 times higher than than what the internet seems to think is the actual ASD incidence, and I imagine that that number includes a lot of "highly functional" ASD cases

What should a parent do when this happens? It will be only perhaps 20-30% risk that the baby actually do have ASD and not just a false positive.

I imagine that ASD "prevention" is mostly behavioural training [I have no idea at all actually] - but how much time and effort would that take? What are the consequences for healthy babies? I imagine that most people would spend a lot of effort on anything that could help in cases like this.

It's a bit problematic since it's not possible to know until after a couple of years if it's was a false positive or not. It might turn out that a lot (or most) of all successful recoveries was in fact "false positives".

[alexandercrohde]

What? 95% accuracy is outstanding. I see that you're saying if you said "No" for all babies, that'd be 95%, so that's a legitimate point.

However, it sounds like it's better than that "We were also able to predict ASD severity, as indicated by the ADOS Calibrated Severity Score, with quite high reliability, also by 9 months of age."

I imagine the intervention is ABA therapy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Applied_behavior_analysis#Effi...) or similar, which is costly, but otherwise not a risk.

[DINKDINK]

>95% accuracy is outstanding

95% specificity and 95% sensitivity isn't good enough to test the general population. See why here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16981888

[dragonwriter]

> 5 % is quite a lot of misdiagnosed babies if this is implemented as a mass screening activity

No, because “screening” and “diagnosis” aren't the same thing.

It might be a lot of children identified for diagnostic follow-up that isn't strictly necessary, though, but that may not outweigh the early support and assistance for those who end up being correctly diagnosed earlier because of the screening.

[jiggunjer]

What do you mean a false positive won't be detectable until a few years? I think by age 1 a parent will notice? Lack of eye contact, altered walking mechanism (foot dragging, tiptoes), non-responsiveness to voices, etc. So maybe a positive test means the kid gets more attention for a few months, that never hurt, right?