July 12, 2021, Cedar Rapids (IA) Gazette: New University of Iowa center focuses on autism diagnosis, intervention and prevention https://www.thegazette.com/higher-education/new-university-of-iowa-center-focuses-on-autism-diagnosis-intervention-and-prevention/
IOWA CITY — The third daughter of four — with two older sisters in their teens and one who’s two years younger — Rogue Westphal is approaching age 3 and charting a different developmental course from her siblings.
While she’s very smart — counting to 20, reciting her ABCs, identifying colors, putting together puzzles and learning some Spanish in addition to her ever-widening English vocabulary — Rogue has a hard time communicating and connecting with other people.
She says mom and dad — but not to her mom and dad. When she wants something, she taps her parents and leads them, instead of using words.
Even as a baby, Rogue liked to keep her distance. When people would laugh, she’d cry. When her younger sister was born, Rogue’s behavior worsened. When she’d get upset, she’d hurt herself.
“She would just start running herself into walls or into the washer and dryer, bang her head up against a chair — like a metal chair — on purpose, and so she’d leave marks on herself,” said her mom, Ashley Westphal, 35, of Evansdale. “We didn't want to get in trouble for that.”
So the family in October 2020 took their 2-year-old to their physician, and as Westphal was trying to explain her daughter’s sensory sensitivity and tantrums, Rogue threw one. “We were there for like an hour and a half trying to calm her down,” Westphal said. “She was running into the beds and everything there, the walls … And they started asking all these questions about things that made her do that.”
The clinicians suggested Rogue had “sensory processing disorder.”
“And the doctor made a comment saying, ‘Oh, you know, most kids who have autism end up having sensory processing disorder,” Westphal said. “And I was like, ‘what?’”
After a referral to see Dr. Lane Strathearn at the University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics — where he directs the Division of Developmental and Behavioral Pediatrics — Rogue was diagnosed with “autism level 2,” plus a “receptive, expressive language disorder.”…
But Westphal is not alone.
Autism diagnoses have exploded in the past two decades. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in 2000 reported 1 in 150 American children had an autism spectrum disorder diagnosis. The prevalence increased to 1 in 54 in 2016, the most recent CDC data show.
Additionally, during a study period from 2009 to 2017, 1 in 6 children ages 3-17 were diagnosed with a development disability — including autism, attention-deficit disorder, hyperactivity disorder, blindness, cerebral palsy and others.
That, Strathearn said, amounts to more than 1.5 percent of the population diagnosed across their life span….
… “So that's one of our particular goals and focuses — to expand information and technology and services to children throughout Iowa.”
In collaboration with neuroscience researchers in the Carver College of Medicine and its Iowa Neuroscience Institute, a team of clinicians, researchers and professors — including from the UI Center for Excellence in Developmental Disabilities — are launching a new UI Hawkeye Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities Research Center, or Hawk-IDDRC.
The UI center expands an existing network of 13 Intellectual & Development Disabilities Research Centers — located from coast to coast and funded by the National Institutes of Health — aimed at supporting science and inquiry while pushing clinical applications for families and kids….
The UI is awaiting final word from the NIH’s National Institute for Child Health and Human Development on a $6 million grant to officially launch the center intended to support a spate of cross-campus studies. One autism-specific endeavor the grant will fund aims to increase early diagnosis, accelerate and target intervention and amass data that could reveal causes and potential prevention methods.
“Our goal is to better understand some of the key factors that predict the onset of autism,” Strathearn said. “We know that the earlier you are able to identify children with autism and provide interventions, the better off those kids are in the long run.”…
The goal is to compare infant blood samples with new blood samples collected when a child is diagnosed with autism, Strathearn said. Researchers specifically want to study epigenetic markers in the blood, which can change over time and affect how genes function, to determine if children with autism experienced epigenetic evolution.
The study aims to cross-reference the children’s social experiences and environments with the blood work to determine potential causation and association.
“We know that our social experience contributes to development in different ways,” he said. “It may be that there's an interaction between genetic risk and social experience over time.”
Researchers also want to track genetic markers that don’t change to see whether certain ones contribute to the risk.
“We're hoping that we can identify early markers,” Strathearn said. “And then we can provide some interventions even earlier than we're doing now….”
