A team of researchers recently suggested that a simple sniffing test can help in determining whether a child has autism even before they start speaking.

The study conducted by doctoral student Liron Rozenkrantz and Professor Noam Sobel, from the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, suggested that autism in children can be diagnosed seeing their physical response to pleasant and unpleasant odors.

The study titled 'A Mechanistic Link between Olfaction and Autism Spectrum Disorder' focuses on Internal Action Models (IAMs), brain templates for sensory-motor coordination underlying diverse behaviors.

Researchers during the study compared 18 children having autism spectrum disorders with 18 typically developing children. Researchers presented pleasant and unpleasant odors to all the subjects to sniff.

The subjects were exposed to 10 times to pleasant smells, such as rose or shampoo scents. They were then also 10 times exposed to unpleasant odors, such as sour milk or rotten fish.

According to the researchers, a child with normal development characteristics will adjust his breathing when smelling a particular tempting smell or an exceptionally nasty one.

Kids do such things with remarkable speed, less than half a second on average, said researchers. But children with autism continue to breathe normally, no matter what the smell is.

Researchers through their study were able to identify 17 of the 18 typically developing children and 12 of the 18 children with autism.

According to the researchers, 'sniff response' is a 'non-verbal, non-task-dependent' method. The findings were published in the July 2 issue of Current Biology.

Prof. Sobel said, "We can identify autism and its severity with meaningful accuracy within less than 10 minutes, using a test that is completely non-verbal and entails no task to follow".