ABSTRACT
Anxiety disorders and other co-occurring psychiatric disorders significantly impact adaptive functioning for many children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). This descriptive study examines the complexity of psychiatric comorbidity in treatment-seeking youth with ASD and anxiety symptoms. Forty-two parents of 8- to 14-year-old children with ASD and anxiety symptoms completed a structured psychiatric interview (K-SADS) and provided information about the child's past and current psychological functioning as part of a screening process to enter an anxiety intervention program. Overall, comorbidity was very complex, with children obtaining an average of 4 psychiatric diagnoses (including anxiety disorders) on a structured clinical interview (range = 0-9). Onset and course differed by psychiatric disorder. Complexity of comorbidity did not differ significantly by age, sex, or autism severity. Despite clinical significance of the symptoms reported, few children were currently (or ever) engaged in mental health treatment or group psychosocial intervention. Although the specificity of the current sample limits the generalizability of these results, findings suggest that treatment-seeking children with ASD and anxiety often present with additional psychiatric symptoms, which supports a transdiagnostic approach to research and intervention in this area. Accurate assessment of comorbidity may provide valuable information for families and clinicians regarding individualized treatment approaches.
ABSTRACT
Language difficulties have been implicated to be a part of the broad autism phenotype in first-degree relatives of individuals with autism. Phonological processing difficulties in particular have been reported by some, but not all groups studying parents or siblings of probands with autism. In the present study, we examined a broad battery of language tasks and general cognitive abilities in parents of children with autistic disorder. Parents of individuals with autism (n = 22) were compared to matched adult controls on a series of cognitive and language measures. Parents of children with autism exhibited lower performance on the matrix reasoning subtest and total performance IQ than did controls, but did not show differences in verbal IQ measures, when tested with the Wechsler Abbreviated Scale of Intelligence (WASI). In addition, parents of children with autism had lower performance on a nonword repetition task, but did not show differences on tests of figurative language, receptive language, expressive language, and verbal fluency and on a questionnaire assessing history of reading difficulties. Results from this study are generally consistent with the cognitive profiles reported for parents of children with autism. Our finding of nonword repetition difficulties, along with others' previous findings for nonword reading in autism families, suggests that problems in phonological processing might be characteristic of the broad autism phenotype.
