Ami Klin- Keynote speech: Developmental Social Neuroscience meets Public Health Challenge

Keynote speech given by Ami Klin from the Emory University, Atlanta, (United States) at the Autism-Europe's 12th International Congress 2019: "A New Dynamic for Change and Inclusion", held the 13-15th September 2019 in Nice, France.

This presentation highlights the critical role of early diagnosis and
intervention in attenuating the symptoms of autism. Data will be presented on early diagnostic indicators obtained through eye-trackingbased behavioral assays that quantify the social disabilities in autism. The results of these assays were used to generate «growth
charts» of normative social engagement, and the deviations from the
norm were taken as early indicators of risk. These methods yielded
high sensitivity and specificity for the screening of infants. The ultimate goal of this effort is to develop objective and quantitative tools for the detection of autism in infancy, tools that might be deployed in primary care practices. Updates on the development and testing of community-viable tools and their promise will be provided.

This workis grounded in recent developmental social neuroscience research with toddlers with autism, which implicated developmentally very early emerging, and evolutionarily highly conserved, mechanisms
of social adaptation that set the stage for reciprocal social interaction, which in term represent the platform for early social brain development. These mechanisms of socialization are under stringent genetic control, setting the scientific basis for parent-delivered, community-viable, early treatment in which social engagement is?engineered? via daily activities, thus impacting a child?s development during every moment of social interaction during a period of maximal neuroplasticit.