Screening for autistic spectrum in children aged 14 to 15 months. I: the development of the Early Screening of Autistic Traits Questionnaire (ESAT).
A four-question parent form spots ASD risk in 14-month-olds with a large share accuracy.
01Research in Context
What this study did
The team built a 14-item parent form called the ESAT. It asks about eye contact, play, pointing, and social smiling.
Parents of 14- to 15-month-olds filled it out during clinic visits. Kids were later tracked to see who got an ASD diagnosis.
What they found
The full ESAT caught a large share of kids later diagnosed with ASD. The short 4-item version still caught a large share.
Only a large share of typical kids were falsely flagged. The 4-item form takes under one minute to complete.
How this fits with other research
Reznick et al. (2007) built the FYI over the study period-olds. Like the ESAT, it uses parent report, but it has 63 items and needs more proof.
Shire et al. (2019) later showed the FYI works best in high-risk siblings. The ESAT gives similar accuracy in everyday clinic families.
Eliasziw et al. (2025) trimmed the SRS to five items for preschool check-ups. The ESAT did the same trick earlier, for babies.
Why it matters
You can tape the 4-item ESAT to your clipboard. While families wait, parents circle four questions. A quick score tells you if a referral is urgent. No extra time, no big cost, and you catch toddlers months before usual screening ages.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
This article describes the development of a screening instrument for young children. Screening items were tested first in a non-selected population of children aged 8-20 months (n = 478). Then, parents of children with clinically diagnosed ASD (n = 153, average age 87 months) or ADHD (n = 76, average age 112 months) were asked to score the items retrospectively for when their child was 14 months old. A 14-item screening instrument, Early Screening of Autistic Traits (ESAT) which had maximal sensitivity and specificity for ASD was developed. The sensitivity of the ESAT was checked in an independent sample of 34 children aged 16-48 months clinically diagnosed with ASD. A 4-item version appears to be a promising prescreening instrument.
Journal of autism and developmental disorders, 2006 · doi:10.1007/s10803-006-0115-0