Individualizing and Combining Treatments in Autism Spectrum Disorder

Abstract

Although several early intervention programs can be efficacious in improving outcomes of children with autism, treatment response is variable, leading most families to enroll their child in several interventions simultaneously. Because knowledge on the effects of combining different therapies is limited, it is critically important to develop and test predictions on how the “active ingredients” of different interventions interact with child characteristics and with one another when combined. An obstacle to this research agenda is the “pre-paradigmatic” stage of the autism early intervention field, in which many practices are organized around seemingly irreconcilable vocabularies. I argue that a formalization of the explanatory structures informing different treatments—based on the four parameters of logical coherence, falsifiability, parsimony, and consilience—can provide a conceptual lingua franca for the formulation of testable hypotheses on treatment individualization and combination, thus facilitating a more coherent and rational approach to research in this area.