Rethinking Diagnostic Constructs in ASD

Description & Learning Objectives

Understanding heterogeneity within and across diagnostic labels is crucial in neurodevelopmental conditions to guide precision health efforts; help the health care sectors meet the needs of individual children, youth, and families; and understand the stories of lived experience. Canadian multimodal data (structural and functional imaging, phenotypic, and genomic data, and treatment response from clinical trials) from the POND network (https://pond-network.ca/) and others will be addressed, to provide updates on current insights in this area and discuss future directions. Partner perspectives and experience will be integrated in the discussion to help focus the work on what matters to neurodivergent individuals and their families.

The learning objectives for this session are to:

• discuss data that challenges current diagnostic labels
• review intervention data to examine the relationship between biology and core symptom definition for ASD
• link biological understandings from the above objectives to patient priorities

This will be a hybrid session, held live and in person from the Cohen Auditorium and simulcast via Zoom.