Longitudinal Developmental Trajectories in Young Autistic Children Presenting with Seizures, Compared to those Presenting without Seizures, Gathered via Parent-report Using a Mobile Application

Abstract

The effect of seizures in 2 to 5-year-old children with ASD was investigated in the largest and the longest observational study to-date. Parents assessed the development of 8461 children quarterly for three years on five orthogonal subscales: combinatorial receptive language, expressive language, sociability, sensory awareness, and health. Seizures were reported in 11% of children. Children with no seizures developed faster compared to matched children with seizures in all subscales. On an annualized basis, participants with no seizures improved their receptive language 1.5-times faster than those with seizures; expressive language: 1.3-times faster; sociability: 2.3-times faster; sensory awareness: 6.2-times faster; and health: 20.0-times faster. This study confirms a high prevalence of seizures in ASD children and points to the need for more systematic approach to the development of treatment strategies.

A Comparison of Parent Reports, the Mental Synthesis Evaluation Checklist (MSEC) and the Autism Treatment Evaluation Checklist (ATEC), with the Childhood Autism Rating Scale (CARS)

“…Furthermore, the MSEC but none of the ATEC subscales demonstrated the benefit of the gluten-free diet and raw-vegetable-eating [ 30 ], as well as the detriment of high video and TV use [ 27 ]. Furthermore, the MSEC was more sensitive than the ATEC subscales to the negative effect of sleep problems [ 41 ] and seizures [ 42 ], as well as to the positive effects of early language intervention [ 28 ], joint engagement with an adult [ 43 ], pretend play [ 29 ], as well as meat-, egg-, and vegetable-eating [ 30 ].…”

Four distinct stages of human language evolution are suggested by clustering of speech and language comprehension abilities in individuals with language deficits

“…Caregivers provided informed consented to participate in the study and completed a 133-item questionnaire approximately every three months. Inclusion criteria for this study were as follows: absence of seizures (which commonly result in intermittent, unstable language deficits 24 ), absence of serious and moderate sleep problems (which are also associated with intermittent, unstable language deficits 25 ), age range of 4 to 21 years (the lower age cutoff was chosen to ensure that participants were exposed to complete set of items listed in Table 1 26 ; the upper age cutoff was chosen to avoid analysis of participants who may be linguistically declining due to aging). When caregivers have completed several evaluations, the last evaluation was used for analysis.…”

Human language evolution: clustering of fifteen language comprehension abilities in 55558 individuals suggests three-step-wise language comprehension acquisition

“…Caregivers consented to anonymized data analysis and completed an 133-item questionnaire approximately every three months. Inclusion criteria for this study were as follows: absence of seizures (that commonly result in intermittent, unstable language comprehension de cits 21 ), absence of serious and moderate sleep problems (that are also associated with intermittent, unstable language comprehension de cits 22 ), age range of 4 to 21 years (the lower age cutoff was chosen to ensure that participants were exposed to all variety of items listed in Table 1 13 ; the upper age cutoff was chosen to avoid analysis of participants who may be linguistically declining due to aging). When caregivers have completed several evaluations, the last evaluation was used for analysis.…”