中華心理衛生協會

Purpose: The purpose of the study was to modify the Screening Tool for Autism in Two-Year-Olds (STAT, Stone et al., 2000; 2004) for Taiwan, called the T-STAT, for level-2 screening of young children with autism spectrum disorder. Methods: Thirty-four young children with autism spectrum disorders and developmental delay were recruited (MEAN AGE: 28.18months old, boy/girl= 28/6). Each group had 17 children aged 24-36 months matched for chronological age, mental age, gender, and socio-economic status. Adapted from the STAT, the T-STAT maintained all of the items in the play and request domains, but substituted one item from joint attention domain and one from the imitation domain. The coding algorithm was the same for the STAT and the T-STAT. Results: The initial data revealed that both the STAT and the T-STAT can appropriately discriminate children with autism spectrum disorders and developmental delay on the domains of play, request, and joint attention, but not on the imitative domain. When using a score of 2 as a cutoff, agreement between the STAT or T-STAT and the ADOS (Autism Diagnostic Observation Scales, Lord, et al., 1999) was acceptable; the sensitivity and specificity were 94.1% and 82.4%, respectively. The results of the agreement between the STAT and T-STAT and clinical diagnosis using the DSM-IV-TR (APA, 2000) were the same as the data shown by the ADOS. Conclusions: Our preliminary data demonstrated that the STAT and T-STAT as level 2 screening tools for autism spectrum disorders is promising. Further studies are needed to test more participants with both typical and atypical autism and to clarify the utility of the STAT and T-STAT in young children aged 2 to 3 with autism spectrum disorders. In addition, longitudinal work is needed to understand the stability of the diagnosis.