Project Description:
The Study to Explore Early Development (SEED) is a multi-year study funded by CDC. It is currently the largest study in the United States to help identify factors that may put children at risk for autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and other developmental disabilities. Understanding the risk factors that make a person more likely to develop an ASD will help us learn more about the causes.
Despite significant advances in our understanding of the clinical features of ASD and substantial progress in establishing ASD prevalence studies across multiple populations, for the most part the causes of ASD remain unexplained. In the face of considerable gaps in our understanding of the causes of ASD, large population-based epidemiologic studies of ASD etiology are lacking. SEED was designed to address this critical need for understanding the causes of ASD.
The research goals for SEED 3 include learning about:
- Physical and behavioral characteristics of children with ASD, children with other developmental disabilities, and children without a developmental delay or disability.
- ASD is a complex disorder. We want to learn more about why people with ASD are the way they arehow they behave, grow, think, and interact with the world around them. We also want to know the same things about children with other developmental disabilities and those with typical development.
- Health conditions among children with and without ASD.
- We are interested in learning more about the health conditions and disorders that might affect children with and without ASD. SEED provides an opportunity to compare health conditions and health-related issues such as sleeping and eating patterns in children with ASD, in children with other developmental disabilities, and in children without a developmental delay or disability.
- Factors associated with a childs risk for developing ASD.
- We hope that SEED will give us a better idea which of the many possible risk factors that we will be evaluating seem to be associated with or related to ASD. The risk factors may be related to genes, health conditions, experiences of the mother during pregnancy, and the health and development of the child during infancy and the first few years of life.
SEED 3 has many strengths, including:
- Case-control design with multiple-source ascertainment of case and comparison groups that include representation from diverse population subgroups;
- Confirmation of developmental status of all subjects based on standardized clinical evaluation procedures;
- Uniform subject inclusion criteria and data collection protocols applied across all study sites;
- Large sample size and study power with the ability to stratify by autism symptom profile to investigate etiologic heterogeneity;
- In-depth exploration of multiple research domains and joint collection of genetic and environmental data.
Science and society in general will benefit from our improved understanding of the causes of developmental problems. This information may lead to possible intervention and prevention strategies for developmental problems.
Keyword(s):
autism, epidemiology, surveillance, secondary conditions
