Leading Israel into the forefront of autism research
THE HEAD of Israel’s first national centre for research into autism has told a London audience of its ambition to make the country an international leader in improving diagnosis and support.
The Azrieli National Centre for Autism and Neurodevelopment Research at Ben Gurion University was set up in 2018 with a multi-disciplinary team including the only child psychiatrist in the southern half of the country.
Addressing the Ben Gurion University Foundation UK, Professor Ilan Dinstein, the centre’s director, said: “The goal is to track autism from very young ages, from childhood on to adulthood, and to figure out what works best for whom”. It was also to find out “what kinds of services are required by autistic children who have different characteristics and different needs”.
Its focus was on improving diagnostic techniques and to “get diagnosis early”.
The team is well on its way to its target of collecting data on 10 per cent of the 32,000 Israelis under the age of 18 who have been diagnosed with autism.
He demonstrated how new technology was being deployed to better identify certain patterns of behaviour in children diagnosed with autism.
The centre was also looking at the comparative effectiveness of education in special needs settings and mainstream schools.
Special educational settings cost four-and-a-half times as much to establish.
When the centre measured how children had progressed in a couple of core areas, “you might expect that there should be a lot of value to the special education system and perhaps expect that children might make more progress in that setting. We find no difference between kids who are in each of the settings when we follow them for a year or two.”
Another speaker was Professor Sir Simon Baron Cohen, director of the Autism Research Centre at Cambridge University, who explained the concept of “neurodiversity”. When he began his research 40 years ago, there was a concept of a normal brain and — to use the “ugly language” of that time — an abnormal one.
As a result of scientific advances, “today we have thrown that whole idea out of the window, the idea that you can reduce brains into just two types”.
There did not seem to “be a single way for the brain to develop. There are a lot of routes… There isn’t a single or right way and we should respect the differences.”
He stressed the need to ensure that people who were different were included in education and employment.
Diagnosis of autism was now more common — one in 44, according to American data — whereas in his early career, it was thought to be rare, affecting just four in 10,000.
Suggesting there could be a connection between people with autistic traits and great inventiveness, he cited the historic examples of Thomas Edison, the pioneer of electric power, and Albert Einstein.
Diagnosis of autism is now far more common