In 2002, the National Institutes of Health sponsored a meeting concerning methodological challenges of research in psychosocial interventions in Autism Spectrum Disorders. This paper provides a summary of the presentations and the discussions that occurred during this meeting. Recommendations to federal and private agencies included the need for randomized clinical trials of comprehensive interventions for autism as the highest, but not the sole priority. Ongoing working groups were proposed to address psychosocial interventions with a focus on relevant statistics, standardized documentation and methods of diagnosis, development of outcome measures, establishment of standards in research; and the need for innovative treatment designs, including application of designs from other research areas to the study of interventions in ASD.
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Acknowledgments
The meeting during which this manuscript was initiated was sponsored by National Institute of Mental Health, National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders, National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, and the NIH Office of Rare Diseases.
The views expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official position of the National Institute of Mental Health, the National Institutes of Health, or any other part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
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Lord, C., Wagner, A., Rogers, S. et al. Challenges in Evaluating Psychosocial Interventions for Autistic Spectrum Disorders. J Autism Dev Disord 35, 695–708 (2005). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-005-0017-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-005-0017-6