Autism Assessment in Iraqi children with Nutritional Supplements for Developing Social and Communication Skills: Parents' Views on Health Behavior

Abstract

Objective: This study aimed to know the impact of autism in Iraqi children by conducting a cross-sectional study during 2020-2021, where 110 cases of autistic children were collected and distributed into two groups: 10 control cases and 100 patient cases. Moreover, this study also demonstrated the importance of health behavior for these Iraqi children. Methodology: The demographic information and data were collected in this study from Baghdad Hospitals over one year. This study used two scales (CARS & Vineland 3) to monitor children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) to cover both adaptive skills and intellectual skills, as many ASD children may have an associated intellectual disability. Results: The statistical analysis program "IBM SPSS)" was used to find out the mean ages and SDs, which was 6.5 ± 1.6 of the control group. As for the patient group, the mean and SDs were (6.3 ± 1.8). According to the first questionnaire, the psychological state of patients was evaluated on the CARS scale, and low levels were found in all evaluation items, and the total score was 45.8 ± 6.09 / 60 with a diagnosis of severe autism. The same applies to the patient group, as there were no statistically significant differences between the two groups. Total score 48 ± 5.9 with a diagnosis of severe autism. Conclusion: Patients and control groups were evaluated according to the Vineland Scale 3. In both groups, they did not achieve the required score, and low scores were found, as the total score for the patients' group was 165.65 ± 68.9, while the total score for the control group was 107 ± 65.4. This research demonstrated that the health behavior of children is significant factor for their health improvement.