A new study suggests that diagnosing a newborn with autism at birth is possible by evaluating the mother's placenta---allowing for more immediate treatment.
Researchers at Yale University were able to determine if a newborn was nine times more likely to develop autism just by looking at abnormal folds of the placenta and determining whether the child had a sibling with the disorder.
"At birth we have a tool now that can tell us who's at risk and who isn't at risk for autism," said Harvey Kliman, the study's lead author and Yale researcher.
"This gives us the opportunity to intervene at a time when the brain is most plastic and able to transform."
But it is not just early intervention that this placenta evaluation technique may offer.
Study co-author, Cheryl Walker, says that researchers may also be able to better determine the genetic and environmental factors that increase the risk for developing autism by identifying a signature for the disorder.
The number of children diagnosed with some type of autism disorder has been on the rise, increasing from one in 5,000 in 1975 to one in 50 in 2013.
But aside from the promising findings revealed during the study, published in the journal Biological Psychiatry, there is still uncertainty about whether the newborn will actually go on to develop autism because the child needs to be at least a year older before that is determined.
For this new study, Kliman was able to determine whether a newborn had a sibling with autism with 90 percent accuracy, based on 217 placenta samples.
And based on the study's findings, Kliman suggests that the abnormal folds in the placenta signals that autism may affect how tissue is folded throughout the body.