autism

When we think about video games, the fact of being a form of entertainment for young people (or not so young) or even that have an educational purpose. But they wanted to go one step further by betting on video games as a diagnostic tool for the little ones in the house and detect diseases early as important as the autism or the ADHD. The importance. Classically, both ADHD and autism are pathologies that they overlap from childhood, making early diagnosis difficult, which is the cornerstone in modern medicine to be able to tackle problems quickly. And this is what has been achieved with a video game that promises to differentiate a patient with ADHD from another with autism in less than an hour, just with the ability to copy the movements made by a silhouette on the screen. As we say, early diagnosis, especially of ASD, is really important to apply treatment that improves the quality of the child’s life and also begins effective interventions as soon as possible. Because although at the moment there are no treatments that are curative, it is possible to try to control some of the symptoms that are generated. Currently there are not many reliable and specific biomarkers to make this diagnosis, and this is a problem because autism spectrum disorder coexists with ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder) in 50-70% of cases. This overlap often results in a “confusing clinical picture” that leads to erroneous or delayed diagnoses that are ultimately a serious problem. Hard to detect. But diagnosing ASD is not easy either, because it is based in many cases on traditional evaluations of motor imitation, because the problem lies in mirror neurons of our brain. In this way, it is classic that if a baby He doesn’t respond by smiling when we make him smile. the case can be raised alarm. But this is a slow thing that requires highly trained observers and has limited reliability, precision, and scalability. The video games. And this is where the video game in question comes in to be able to give us the tools that we lacked on a daily basis to do the job. diagnosis of ASD. Something that a research team has achieved by developing the Computerized Assessment of Motor Imitation, or CAMI. A system that is a short task, lasting one minute, which has been designed as a very attractive video game so that you want to play. The system in this case uses different computer vision methods to evaluate the performance of the imitation without the need to place any type of sensor on the children and almost without human intervention to interpret the results that are generated. Imitation as key. The objective of the study was clear: To examine whether CAMI could identify imitation problems specific to autism compared to children without any type of illness or children with ADHD. In the event that a child could not imitate the movements that appear on the screen, we could be talking about a major problem that is causing all of this. But the obligatory question in this case is… Why do we look at the imitation of movements? The answer is that imitation performance is considered a promising biomarker that is quite specific for diagnosing autism. Imitation in this case is essential for social learning and interpersonal relationships, and its deficit has been associated with children who have ASD compared to healthy children. The challenge was to demonstrate that this deficit is specific to autism and not to other conditions with atypical motor profiles, such as ADHD. That is, if a child could not follow the movement that appeared on the screen it was due to a problem related to the autism spectrum and not because there was a problem in attention. The experiment. The cross-sectional study recruited 183 children between 7 and 13 years old. Participants were divided into four groups: ADHD (without ASD), ASD with co-occurring ADHD, ASD without ADHD (ASD only), and neurotypical children. The test consisted of two trials of one minute each, in which children were asked to stand up and copy the “dance” movements that an avatar made on the screen. The movements in these cases were recorded by the Xbox Kinect cameras and CAMI automatically calculated an imitation score for each trial ranging from 0 to 1, with one being perfect imitation. These scores were averaged to obtain a composite score. The result. The results were significant. Children with ASD, regardless of whether they had ADHD or not, showed significantly worse CAMI performance than neurotypical children. In contrast, children with ADHD alone showed CAMI performance similar to that of neurotypical children. But screening could also be done within patients who pointed to having ASD, since worse performance on the CAMI was associated with greater autism traits (measured by ADOS-2), specifically in restricted and repetitive social affect and behavior. However, performance is not associated with ADHD traits or general motor ability, which gives us a clue to be able to refine the diagnosis much more. The authors conclude that this CAMI method, which is low-cost and scalable, specifically distinguishes ASD not only from neurotypical development, but also from ADHD. Although currently a research tool, the findings lay the foundation for establishing CAMI as a definitive test to see if a child has autism or not. Images | Alireza Attari Sam Pak In Xataka | We have discovered a genetic mechanism to explain up to 80% of autism cases. Thanks to some Spanish scientists