A new study suggests that the widely used medical test called an electroencephalogram (EEG) may be able to diagnose children as young as 2 with autism.
An EEG is a test that records the brain's electrical activity by attaching sensors to a person's head that print out the data to a computer. According to WebMD, the test is used to diagnosed epilepsy, sleep disorders, measure brain activity in patients in a coma or to distinguish if a person has a physical problem in the brain or nervous system or a mental health problem.
Researchers at Boston Children's Hospital compared raw EEG data from 430 children with autism to data collected from 554 control subjects, all ages 2 to 12. They found that children with autism displayed consistent EEG patterns which indicate altered connectivity between brain regions.
