Novel Outcome Measures in ASD — Request for Applications

Intervention studies for autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are hampered by a lack of reliable and sensitive measures to assess treatment response, whether the interventions are behavioral or pharmacological in approach. Instead, treatment research commonly relies on subjective parent- and clinician-reported assessments that show inadequate psychometric properties, are highly susceptible to placebo effects, and may not be specific to ASD-related impairments. Some semi-objective clinician-administered measures are available, but these remain early in development or are not specific to ASD. A few objective measures, such as eye-tracking, have been used as treatment outcomes, but the psychometric properties and clinical meaningfulness of these measures have not been demonstrated adequately.

Objective outcome measures that are both reliable and sensitive to change would permit smaller and shorter studies and would help to minimize false-negative results. The greater statistical power afforded by such measures would also facilitate studies in subpopulations that might be more likely to benefit from a specific treatment approach.

A previous request for applications (RFA) for novel outcome measures research was issued by the Simons Foundation Autism Research Initiative (SFARI) in 2015. The grants awarded under that RFA, described here, enabled progress on several assessment approaches, but none are fully validated or ready for broad deployment at this time.