A UK-LMIC Research Network for Autism Spectrum Disorder (ULMiRN-ASD)

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is characterised by social interaction and communication deficits, stereotyped interests and repetitive behaviours. According to the Autism and Developmental Disabilities Monitoring (ADDM) Network, the global prevalence rate of ASD has come to one in forty four in 2021 compared to one in fifty four in the earlier estimates. The South Asian countries such as India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka represent more than 20% of the world’s population. The prevalence of ASD in these countries has rather a very broad range. In some estimates, it is as low as 0.09% in India and 1.07% in Sri Lanka to as high as 3% in the capital of Bangladesh alone. This varies from the estimated 1.5% in the United States to 1.1% in Europe. One of the major challenges related to the ASD population is that around 25-30% of children with ASD and 50% of the adults with ASD may not develop spoken language. Thus, an early detection and timely intervention towards augmenting social and communication skills is desperately needed. Prof. Braj Bhushan at IIT Kanpur developed the Indian Affective Picture Database (IAPD) of facial images of four Indian expressers with six basic emotions (i.e., happy, sad, disgust, fear, anger, surprise) and neutral emotion presented at five different visual angles. IAPD has been used by other researchers in India to determine the deficit in social and communication skills in children with ASD. The database has been validated on healthy population only, using behavioural methods in India and neurophysiological method in a rather limited way in UK using MEG scans of about twenty six adults. In order to develop a robust early detection tool, the database needs to be validated on age-matched culture-fair individuals in sufficiently large number. The major objective of ULMiRN-ASD is therefore to develop a culture-fair tool for early detection of problems of social and communication skills in children with ASD.