Children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) experience high rates of anxiety, sensory processing problems, and gastrointestinal (GI) problems; however, the associations among these symptoms in children with ASD have not been previously examined. The current study examined bivariate and multivariate relations among anxiety, sensory over-responsivity, and chronic GI problems in a sample of 2,973 children with ASD enrolled in the Autism Treatment Network (ages 2-17 years, 81.6 % male). Twenty-four percent of the sample experienced at least one type of chronic GI problem (constipation, abdominal pain, bloating, diarrhea, and/or nausea lasting three or more months). Children with each type of GI problem had significantly higher rates of both anxiety and sensory over-responsivity. Sensory over-responsivity and anxiety were highly associated, and each provided unique contributions to the prediction of chronic GI problems in logistic regression analyses. The results indicate that anxiety, sensory over-responsivity and GI problems are possibly interrelated phenomenon for children with ASD, and may have common underlying mechanisms.

Objective-To examine attention bias towards threat faces in a large sample of anxiety-disordered youths using a well-established visual probe task.Method-Study participants included 101 children and adolescents (ages 7-18 years) with generalized anxiety disorder, social phobia and/or separation anxiety disorder enrolled in a multisite anxiety treatment study. Non-anxious youths (n = 51; ages 9 -18 years) were recruited separately. Participants were administered a computerized visual probe task that presents pairs of faces portraying threat (angry), positive (happy) and neutral expressions. They pressed a response-key to indicate the spatial location of a probe that replaced one of the faces on each trial. Attention bias scores were calculated from response times to probes for each emotional face type.Results-Compared to healthy youths, anxious participants demonstrated a greater attention bias towards threat faces. This threat bias in anxious patients did not significantly vary across the anxiety disorders. There was no group difference in attention bias towards happy faces.Conclusions-These results suggest that pediatric anxiety disorders are associated with an attention bias towards threat. Future research might examine the manner in which cognitive bias in anxious youth changes with treatment.