University of Alabama at Birmingham School of Public Health researchers will expand their data collection to better identify Alabama children with autism spectrum disorders with a $1.7 million award from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The UAB grant is part of the Autism and Developmental Disabilities Monitoring (ADDM) Network, which provides comparable, population-based estimates of the number of 8-year-old children with autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) and other developmental disabilities.
The Alabama Autism Surveillance Project is designed to use information from multiple sources, and this year UAB researchers will include school data in conjunction with clinical data collected since 2002, said Martha Wingate, Dr.PH., an assistant professor in the Department of Health Care Organization and Policy and the lead investigator on the CDC grant.