How Pediatricians Screen Children for Autism

Your medic is not just taking their time

Your pediatrician watches your baby smile, how he seeks his attention, tries to regain his attention during a conversation, how they point, how they wave his hands, how they respond to his name, and how they cry. These observations combined with family history, health screenings, and parental perspectives are extremely helpful in identifying children’s risk of ASD.

Family’s Medical History

Parents need to be informed as well as possible of their family’s medical history so that their child, in turn, has a complete medical history throughout their life and plays an important role in:

• Identify inherited disorders in the family
• To determine hereditary patterns and recurrence of risks due to known and suspected genetic disorders
• Identify those at risk for a genetic disorder
• Provide information necessary for adequate genetic counseling
• Provide an important complement to the control of childhood diseases such as growth problems and asthma

Ideally, you should add your family’s medical history to the record during your child’s first visit to your child’s pediatrician, as well as during the mother’s first prenatal care…