Autism at Six Months? The Science Is Moving Faster Than the System

We may be able to identify autism before parents notice anything. The question is whether the system is prepared to do anything about it.

At six months, everything can look typical. But new research suggests the brain may already be telling a different story.

For decades, autism has followed a familiar and frustrating timeline. Parents notice something feels different, often long before they can articulate it. Pediatricians advise monitoring. Developmental delays become clearer. And a diagnosis typically arrives sometime between ages two and four after critical windows for early intervention have already begun to narrow. But emerging research is now challenging that entire sequence. Studies using functional connectivity MRI (fcMRI), a type of brain imaging that maps how different regions of the brain communicate, suggest that autism risk may be detectable as early as six months of age—well before any behavioral symptoms appear.

The most widely cited work in this area comes from researchers at institutions including the University of North Carolina, who have been studying infants considered “high-risk,” typically because t…