Review of Autism Screening Tests

Introduction: autism is a neurodevelopmental disorder that onset in the first 3 years of life and led to lifelong disability. despite the early onset of symptoms, diagnosis of this syndrome does not happen until several years later, some any children lose the opportunity for early inter vention. there are various tools for screening and diagnosis, but their design, strengths and weaknesses are different. the aim of this study is assess these tools from various aspects to provide a comprehensive view.materials and methods: this study is a narrative literature review on screening tools of autism. comprehensive searches of the scientific literature were conducted in textbooks and 8 electronic databases (proquest, wiley, google scholar, sid, scopus, web of science ،science direct ، and medline) and pediatric book. language restriction (persian and english) was applied. the search strategy consisted of keywords and medical subject headings for autism and various screening tests.results: in this study, 28 screening tests were identified from 1992 to 2014. chat is oldest test and the most recent test is childhood autism screening test (cast) the minimum age that can perform the screening is six months that related to infant toddler checklist (itc). minimum time of testing was 5 minutes for checklist for autism in toddlers (chat) and the maximum time was 90-120 minutes for autism screening instrument for educational planning - third edition (asiep-3). ritvo autism asperger diagnostic scale-revised (raads-r) test was the highest specificity and specificity (100%) and the lowest specificity was 14% in early screening of autistic traits (esat) test. conclusion: the results of this study indicate that any of the autism screening tools consider specific skill and various aspects of the disease, careful evaluation is need to choose proper test.