Null and Noteworthy: High quality of life, IACC dialogue, blended outcomes on interventions | Spectrum
Illustration by Laurène Boglio
Last month, the Interagency Autism Coordinating Committee (IACC) met for the second time this year. Part of their discussion concerned the choices for their Progress Summary, a list of studies made available to policy makers to depict “groundbreaking and significant advances” in this area.
This gave rise to an important question: what is considered to be groundbreaking and significant? One committee member, Paul Wang of the Simons Foundation, wondered if it might not make sense to consider not only significant positive results but those that did not produce results, or, as he put it, “papers that may show that we have no answers. ”(The Simons Foundation is the parent organization of Spectrum.)“ Can we recognize these, one could call them negative results, as important publications? ”asked Wang.
The IACC is still compiling their list, but here at Null and Noteworthy we routinely acknowledge these results. Spectrum recently reported on several, including an intranasal oxytocin study that found no benefit in autistic children and two studies that refute a proposed association between labor epidural anesthesia and autism; a third is discussed below along with other results.
As always, thank you for your feedback, and please keep sending your thoughts, ideas, interesting studies, and cat photos to laura@spectrumnews.org.
Epidural anesthesia, again:
A previous issue of this newsletter highlighted a rebuttal of a study that found an increased likelihood of autism in children of women who received epidural anesthesia during labor. Two more studies published in September confirmed the zero results. Now another study brings the zero sum to four. This used data from the Scottish National Health Service to examine, among other things, the neurological development of 435,281 children born in Scotland between 2007 and 2016. After considering confounding factors, the researchers found that children born to women who had received epidural anesthesia were less likely to have communication or fine motor problems than children whose mothers had not received epidural anesthesia by the age of 2. An editorial accompanying the study noted that the results provide further evidence that there is “no meaningful association” between epidural anesthesia and neurodevelopmental disorders in children.
The findings and the editorial were published in the JAMA Network Open in October.
Which intervention for whom ?:
Much research on autism has been based on the idea that providing interventions at an early age – possibly before autism is diagnosed – will produce better outcomes for the child. But a recent review shows that the reality is not that simple. The researchers analyzed the results of 13 studies of parent-provided interventions in 715 infants and toddlers at high likelihood of being autistic. Children who received interventions showed no significant improvements in their language, social behavior, motor skills, or other developmental outcomes, although some showed small changes in their autism characteristics. The results show that researchers still do not know which interventions work best for which children, the authors write, and see an “urgent need” for a more differentiated approach to the investigation and implementation of early interventions.
The results were published in Autism in October.
Confirmation pick-up:
Since science is never straightforward, another review of interventions came to the opposite conclusion. He analyzed studies attempting to replicate a 1987 study showing the effectiveness of applied behavior analysis (ABA) developed by the University of California, Los Angeles’ Young Autism Project and first introduced in 1980; the study was cited nearly 70,000 times. The new work identified 17 studies involving 595 autistic children, 401 of whom participated in UCLA intervention groups (the remaining children received no interventions). On average, children in the UCLA groups showed fewer autism characteristics over time, a change not seen in controls that replicated the original results. The intervention also appeared to help with cognitive function and communication skills.
The results were published in Behavioral Interventions on November 2nd.
Life quality:
If autism research is aimed at improving the quality of life of autistic people, researchers must first understand how quality of life varies between autistic people. Several studies have shown that autistic women tend to report a poorer quality of life than autistic men, especially when it comes to their physical health. A new analysis of 67 autistic and 66 non-autistic adults repeated this finding: While both autistic men and women had a reduced psychological quality of life compared to non-autistic people, only autistic women reported more physical problems than their non-autistic peers. However, the researchers also found that autistic women’s mental health appeared to improve with age.
The results were published in Quality of Life Research in October.
Brain folds, revisited:
The first issue of this newsletter featured a review of studies examining cortical gyrification – the pattern of wrinkles in the tissue of the cortex – in people with autism or attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Although the review did not find any differences between the groups, the researchers indicated that no conclusion could be drawn without using the same method to compare people with autism and ADHD. This is exactly what the researchers have now done. After imaging the brains of 197 autistic children, 96 children with ADHD, and 246 neurotypical children, the researchers still found no differences in brain folds between the groups. In addition, the patterns were not associated with features of ADHD or autism, suggesting that atypical gyrification is not a marker for either condition.
The results were published in Cerebral Cortex in September.
among others:
- A review of 52 papers found that children were born before 37 weeks of pregnancy are 3.3 times more likely to suffer from autism than full term children, confirming a link between autism and Premature birth.
- People with a variant of chromosome 16 associated with autism sleep just as long like those without the variant, but have more sleep disorders.
- Neither autistic people nor people with elevated autism characteristics have skewed feedback loops with sensory input and expectations, a problem that occurs in people with schizophrenia, according to a small study of such ‘Circular reasoning. ‘
- Sequencing newborn genomes does not cause additional stress for parents, even if sequencing reveals a genetic risk, according to a survey by the expanded screening program BabySeq; Spectrum wrote about the push for such screens for autism-related diseases in July.
- Autistic and non-autistic children show no differences in the motor functions that control Eye movementssuggesting that these functions may not explain the observed instantaneous differences in people with autism.
- As Children born prematurely play does not correlate with the autistic characteristics of these children, in contrast to the playing of siblings of autistic children, although both groups have an increased likelihood of having autism.
- Antipsychotics don’t increase the risk of seizures in people with autism who are often prescribed the medication.
- Anxiety symptoms are not associated with either autistic or non-autistic children Amygdala volume, despite other research Suggest links between amygdala and fear.
- A review of interventions for improvement executive function in autistic children and young adults found that a lack of replication studies and inadequate publication of null results clouded the conclusions.
- A small study of motor learning found that people with and without autism are equally adept at adjusting their keystrokes in response to unpredictable stimuli.
- And finally, the Ritvo Autism Asperger’s diagnostic scale does not seem a useful screener for autism in adults, at least according to a small study.
Cite this article: https://doi.org/10.53053/QRJQ1978
