Adaptive functioning of autistic children is traditionally measured through informant-report, often from parents. Behaviour varies across settings though, and context-specific reports should be considered. Limited and inconsistent results show low parent-education professional concordance, but no research has yet explored item level response…

Feasible and accurate assessment tools developed for non-specialists are needed to scale community-based models of autism evaluation. The purpose of this study was to evaluate use of the Screening Tool for Autism in Toddlers and Young Children (STAT) when used by primary care practitioners (n = 10) across a statewide system of early diagnosis set…

The Assessment of Basic Learning Abilities (ABLA) was developed to assess the ease or difficulty with which individuals with intellectual disabilities are able to learn an imitation task and five 2-choice discriminations, called levels. Level 6 is an auditory-visual discrimination. We examined whether children with autism who passed ABLA Level 6…

Background: Studies of chromosome 15 abnormality have implicated over-expression of paternally imprinted genes in the 15q11-13 region in the aetiology of autism. To test this hypothesis we compared individuals with Prader-Willi syndrome (PWS) due to uniparental disomy (UPD--where paternally imprinted genes are over-expressed) to individuals with…