Studying Childhood-onset Behavioral, Psychiatric, and Developmental Disorders

This is a diagnostic protocol designed to provide opportunities for identifying new clinical syndromes and permitting longitudinal assessments of a variety of childhood behavioral, psychiatric and developmental disorders. Disorders of particular interest are: autism, disorders of social cognition and other neurodevelopmental disorders; childhood psychiatric disorders and particularly those with acute symptom onset; and unique clinical presentations of pediatric behavioral syndromes, such as those associated with genetic disorders or those with a unique family history. Objectives: The primary objective of this protocol is to evaluate a variety of behavioral, neuropsychiatric, and neurodevelopmental conditions. The protocol will allow OCD investigators to gain additional knowledge about the course of various childhood behavioral syndromes. The information obtained is expected to generate questions to be answered and hypotheses to be tested in future protocols. Study Population: The number of participants to be enrolled will be set up to 1,000 probands (children, adolescents and adults). Design: This is a natural history protocol. The cross-sectional portion of this study may include in-depth medical, sleep and neurodevelopmental assessments to evaluate the relationship of biological abnormalities with neuropsychiatric symptomatology. Standard therapeutic interventions may be utilized to evaluate their effects in well-characterized participants with unique clinical presentations. Participants also may be asked to return to NIH for periodic follow-up assessments, in order to facilitate the longitudinal assessment of natural and treated courses of illness as a means of better understanding their progression and pathophysiology. Outcome Measures: No formal outcomes will be measured; however, the clinical assessments of enrolled participants may be used to evaluate correlates of clinical symptomatology and response to standard therapeutic interventions.