The Tennessee Department of Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities has renewed its contract with Vanderbilt Kennedy Center’s Treatment and Research Institute for Autism Spectrum Disorders (TRIAD) to continue and expand a partnership with Tennessee Early Intervention System (TEIS).

ACM Lifting Lives, the charitable arm of the Academy of Country Music, has made a generous gift to Vanderbilt University Medical Center for programs and research demonstrating the healing power of music to improve the lives of children with autism spectrum disorder.

Parents of children with autism spectrum disorders benefited from the addition of mindfulness-based stress reduction to parent-implemented behavioral interventions.

Researchers have been awarded $1 million from the National Institute of Mental Health to evaluate a new mobile app designed to help pediatricians recognize autism risk in young children.

Although increasing evidence shows that children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) can be accurately identified during their second year of life, the average age of diagnosis in both Tennessee and across the country remains well above 4 years of age.

A recent study by Vanderbilt researchers of 11 counties in Middle Tennessee revealed that children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) were nearly 2.5 times more likely than children without ASD to be reported to the Child Abuse Hotline by the age of 8.

“What I learned there — that’s what we’re doing here.”