Can a simple eye exam help diagnose autism?

Researchers studied a cohort of 400 children aged 9 to 10 in New Zealand who exhibited a full range of possible autism traits and conducted a variety of vision and visuomotor processing tests with them. Females are often underdiagnosed with being on the autism spectrum because they often mask their symptoms more successfully than males. The key to understanding why may be in a simple eye exam. New research from the University of Waterloo's School of Optometry and Vision Science found a difference between how females and males with high autistic traits process visual information. This provides researchers with a possible correlation to explain why some females are underdiagnosed and to help medical teams understand how a person's neurodivergent presentation is tied to how they process sensory "Interestingly, this effect was dependent on the sex of the child. To be specific, males with high autistic traits tended to be worse on both object recognition and hand-eye coordination tests, whereas females with high autistic traits were totally fine with object recognition tests but showed the same association as males with the hand-eye coordination tests. The researchers studied a cohort of 400 children aged 9 to 10 in New Zealand who exhibited a full range of possible autism traits and conducted a variety of vision and visuomotor processing tests with them.