Posted on: March 8, 2024; Updated on: March 8, 2024
By Chris Horn, chorn@sc.edu
Prevalence of autism among children is rising, but access to new, evidence-based interventions is often spotty at best, an obstacle that one University of South Carolina clinician hopes to improve through her research.
“I'm trying to improve and fine tune evidence-based supports and interventions for autistic children and adolescents and their families, and, through implementation science, I'm trying to improve access to those interventions to support autistic kids in actual community settings,” says Sarah Edmunds, an assistant professor of psychology and an affiliate scientist in the Carolina Autism and Neurodevelopment Research Center.
While academic clinicians in recent years have amassed a substantial set of effective therapies for those on the autism spectrum, much of it is not accessible to the public at large, Edmunds says. “It’s called the implementation gap. It takes about 17 years for an evidence-based intervention or therapy to make it from the research phase at a university to actually being available in any sort of clinic or setting that the average person might find,” she says. “That’s not acceptable.”
In her current research, Edmunds is investigating the usefulness of several emerging therapies for autism collectively called Naturalistic Developmental Behavioral Interventions with an eye toward adapting them to address individual children’s needs.
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