A new study has found that an intensive early-intervention therapy that is effective at improving young children’s cognition and language skills can normalize the brain activity of those with autism.
The Early Start Denver Model combines play-based, developmental, relationship-based approaches and the teaching methods of applied-behavioral analysis.
The study, published last month in the Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry, found that children who received the intervention showed greater brain activation when viewing faces rather than objects, a response typical of the non-autistic children in the study, and the opposite of the children with autism who received other interventions.
