A long-term Swedish study, Early Autism/ADHD Sweden (EASE), follows children from infancy to age ten to study early signs and development of autism and ADHD, using diverse methods like eye tracking, EEG, MRI, behavioral assessments, and gut microbiota analysis to map brain development.

The project is a collaboration between Karolinska Institutet’s KIND center and Uppsala University’s DIVE lab, employing a wide range of measures to track development over time, including eye tracking, pupil measurements, EEG, MRI, and gut microbiota analysis.

Participants include children with and without close relatives affected by autism or ADHD, allowing examination of typical development alongside early deviations within the same framework.

Researchers aim to identify possible autism subgroups, such as individuals with later-emerging symptoms, and to understand factors shaping long-term developmental trajectories.

Early findings show infants later diagnosed with autism often follow others’ gaze similarly but have reduced initiation of joint attention by ten months, indicating early social-motor differences rather than perceptual deficits.

Three-year-olds with autism may show heightened ability to detect visual details in complex images, suggesting variability in cognitive processing.

Infants who later receive an autism diagnosis may exhibit stronger pupil reactions to changes in light and to non-social sounds, pointing to early differences in attention and sensory processing.

The extension will support investigation into whether infancy measures—brain activity, eye movements, and behavior—predict later development and will foster international collaborations on ADHD trajectories.

A SEK 10 million grant from the Marianne and Marcus Wallenberg Foundation extends the study to age ten, enabling analysis of diagnosis stability, developmental trajectories, and the development of AI-based tools to predict diagnoses at age ten from data collected at age three.

A core goal is to assess the stability of early diagnoses over time and explore whether subgroups exist among autism cases.

The extension also supports evaluating whether infancy measures correlate with later outcomes and will enable AI-driven prediction tools using early data.

The five-year donation from the Wallenberg Foundation funds the extension to ten years, focusing on trajectory mapping and stability of early diagnoses.