The Quality of Life among Siblings of Autistic Individuals: A Scoping Review

Abstract

Autism spectrum disorders are a heterogeneous group of neurodevelopmental disorders presenting at a tender age, defined by qualitative deficits in social interactions and communication, thus having a substantial influence on the subject’s family unit. Quality of life (QoL) refers to a person’s perspective of their life situation, cultural and value background, objectives, expectations, and standards. When focusing on childhood and adolescence, age-related changes should be considered. For this scoping review, the authors used three peer-review literature database sources (PubMed/MEDLINE, Scopus, and ERIC) to delve deeper into components of the QoL of non-autistic siblings of autistic individuals. At the completion of the eligibility phase, 9 studies were included out of the 96 initial records. A total of 4/9 articles (45%) compared the non-autistic siblings of autistic individuals to the siblings of non-autistic people, while 3/9 articles (33%) compared the first group to the non-autistic siblings of patients with other chronic diseases. A total of 5/9 studies adopted specific questionnaires to evaluate QoL. Results from 6/9 articles revealed that the autism condition has varying effects on non-autistic siblings’ QoL. According to the considered research, non-autistic siblings of autistic individuals experienced decreased psychological well-being, less perceived social support, increased aggressiveness and conflict-proneness, and higher levels of anxiety and stress impacting their QoL. The present findings provide important implications for additional and more punctual studies in this sector. Furthermore, as being a non-autistic sibling of an autistic individual is commonly undervalued, this review advocates the need to organize and improve support services for siblings.

Tic-Related Obsessive–Compulsive and Eating Disorders in Dandy–Walker Variant: A Case Report and Systematic Reappraisal of Psychiatric Profiles

“…Consistent with the previous research in the field, early language development difficulties influenced the patient's poor social adjustment during schoolyears, possibly leading to episodes of peer victimization and a tendency to isolation [54]. Together with social difficulties, her siblings' disability may have had an impact on the development of much clearer psychic distress during the transition from late adolescence to young adulthood [55][56][57], encompassing depressive symptoms, aberrant eating behaviors, obsessive-compulsive symptoms, and tics. To this extent, the previous literature has already documented instances of both adults and children with DWC abnormalities presenting with concurrent depression or OCD [26,38,39,44,58].…”

“…Additionally, approximately 30% of patients were not receiving any medications at the onset of their psychiatric symptoms [23,25,27,35,36,39,[43][44][45] and over 80% had not already been diagnosed with DWC until adulthood [21][22][23][25][26][27][28][29][32][33][34][37][38][39][40][43][44][45][46][47][48][49][50][51][52][53]. These considerations may imply that the condition often progresses silently from childhood to late adolescence, only to manifest abruptly upon reaching young adulthood, possibly through the manifestation of psychic distress triggered by exposure to environmental factors [55][56][57].…”

Made to feel different: Families perspectives on external responses to autism and the impacts on family well-being and relationships

“…With mothers and fathers as the primary caregivers of autistic adolescents, high levels of depression and anxiety are prevalent in parents caring for an autistic child (Dababnah & Parish, 2016;Dabrowska & Pisula, 2010;Dale et al, 2006;Davis & Carter, 2008;Estes et al, 2009;Gray, 2003;Ludlow et al, 2011;Sharma et al, 2013;Spain et al, 2017) as well as increased levels of stress (Corbett & Simon, 2014;Dumas et al, 1991;Gray, 2006;Gray & Holden, 1992) and fatigue (Cadman, 2012;Firth & Dryer, 2013;Giallo et al, 2013;Hoefman et al, 2014) and increased cortisol levels (Makris et al, 2022). Siblings with an autistic brother or sister are thought to be at greater risk of social behavioural adaptation problems within childhood and into adulthood (Quatrosi et al, 2023). Social behavioural adaptation includes continual alteration and adjustment of an individual's behaviour that appropriately or suitably responds to another's behaviour in social exchanges (Gernsbacher, 2006).…”

Lived experiences of a Tagasalo having siblings with special needs: An educational implication

“…In childhood, environmental and economic conditions appear to have a more significant impact on the quality of life than the physical or psychological condition of the subject (Quatrosi et al, 2023). The relationship quality with siblings also seems to affect the individual's personality traits (Longobardi et al, 2019).…”