Easter Seals and the Brain Plasticity Institute: Working Together

Autism

The Issue

• According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, 2011, as many as one in every 110 children is diagnosed with some form of autism. For boys it’s one in every 70 – that’s a new diagnosis every 20 minutes.
• Autism Spectrum Disorders, ranging from mild to severe, are now more prevalent than Down syndrome and childhood diabetes combined.
• While there is no known cause or cure, nor one known single effective treatment – autism is treatable. People living with autism, at any age, are capable of making significant progress through personalized interventions and therapy, and can and do lead meaningful lives.
• Children aren’t being diagnosed with autism as early in life as possible. The average age for an autism diagnosis is 4 and a half; it’s possible to diagnose children as early as 24 months.
• Early detection gives children that critical window of opportunity and access to early intervention services and treatment – because the earlier the treatment begins, the better the outcomes.

Addressing Autism

Easter Seals is partnered with the Brain Plasticity Institute to develop and test a comprehensive set of online exercises designed to address the unique needs of individuals living with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). With government funding, the research team has developed 19 of 22 novel exercises in an initial exercise suite, Training Approach to Autism (TARA), to build social skills. Component exercises have been tested in pilot studies conducted at University of California at San Francisco (UCSF), University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), Harvard University, University of North Carolina (UNC) and Haifa University. The pilot data indicates:

• Participants can comply with the prescribed schedules of usage
• TARA programs drive significant improvements in behavior and engagement in social settings
• Benefits extend to real-world social cognition and to improved indices of quality of life
• Individuals with autism who participated in TARA experienced improved social behaviors and engagements -- social interactions more in line with typically developing individuals
• At the same time, studies in autism have shown that large-scale neurological and behavioral improvements can still be achieved, by appropriate brain plasticity-based forms of training, in affected children and adults of any age.

The Brain Plasticity Institute: Project Scope

Today, autism impacts the lives of as many as one in every 110 children. Autism is a lifelong disability that affects the way a person’s brain functions. Many individuals with ASD require a high level of ongoing support. Social difficulties often affect education, employment, and home and community life. Special education services are typically provided in small groups or one-on-one, and many individuals living with ASD need support and services into and, often, through adulthood.

Here, we describe a new form of treatment designed to improve the functional abilities of individuals with ASD in ways that can be expected to substantially increase the likelihood that they can lead successful and socially independent lives. We can achieve this goal by providing intensive computer-based instruction to teach social skills. Because the training programs are playable on any Internet browser and are easily implemented in any language, they can be accessed on any modern computer and readily distributed to anyone in need, globally. Because all compliance and progress data is automatically recorded and (with permission) shipped to a supervising teacher, therapist or doctor, the delivery of this therapeutic intervention can be professionally controlled, and the benefits derived from it automatically documented and assured.

Our initial goal is to help establish more useful and more complete social cognition and social control within a large, immediately accessible subpopulation¹ of higher-performing ASD individuals. Social impairments can impact an individual’s personal success, limit interactions with family and friends, and frustrate community attachments. They also affect one’s ability to live independently, secure meaningful employment and achieve overall well-being. This training approach has already been shown to improve core social skills and to provide benefits in elemental social cognition abilities that generalize to improved social interactions in everyday life. The use of this elaborate training suite should greatly assist therapists, teachers and parents in their efforts to support individuals with autism, particularly with the social challenges this population faces.

Our second-stage goal is to extend the application of the same basic strategy to individuals with more significant involvement. We see a clear path to substantially improving the abilities of individuals of all ages with ASD, and have generated a large body of preliminary evidence indicating that strong improvements in each deficit area can almost certainly be achieved for a significant group of individuals in these clinical spectra.

All of these strategies shall be evaluated in controlled ‘gold standard’ studies conducted in Easter Seals clinical network, with the support of internationally distinguished scientific leaders.

We believe with your support and the crucial assistance of the research and development team at the Brain Plasticity Institute, we can help transform the lives of millions of high-needs individuals living with autism. We are confident that we can empower these individuals in ways that richly enable greater personal achievement, establish more effective and safer independence, and most of all, help them on the path to developing stronger, positive personal attachments, and a happier, more meaningful, childhood and adult life.

Help us help scientists and researchers at the Brain Plasticity Institute meet this great human challenge.

1. Preliminary studies indicate that 60-70% of individuals in ASD and PDD cohorts will be able to comply with the demands represented by these game-like training tasks. As is explained later in this narrative, other still more severely impaired children shall be the target of 2nd-phase research development efforts.