In some children with autism, normal development stalls, often around age 2, and they start to lose many of the communication and social skills they had already mastered. The first large epidemiological study of this phenomenon, called regression, reveals that it occurs in at least 20 percent of children with autism1.
The new work, published in the July/August issue of the Journal of Developmental and Behavioral Pediatrics, also shows that regression can appear long after the toddler years.
A better understanding of regression could help researchers predict how children will fare over time and provide clues to autism’s biological basis. But despite decades of research, scientists continue to debate how prevalent regression is and even what it is.
