Repetitive and stereotyped behaviors in neurodevelopmental disorders: an observational analysis of four diagnostic groups.

Background: Repetitive and Stereotyped Behaviors (ST) are one of the key features of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and they frequently occur in children with developmental delay/intellectual disability or sensory deprivation, but they are also described in children otherwise typical. This study aims to describe and compare ST in children with different neurodevelopmental disorders and in children having stereotypies but no other medical diagnosis (primary stereotypies).

Methods: The study sample comprised children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) developmental delay (DD), severe visual impairment (VI) and primary stereotypies (PS), aged between 2 and 12 years old.

Management of Autism Spectrum Disorder in Italian Units of Child and Adolescent Mental Health: Diagnostic and Referral Pathways.

Overall, the present pilot study provides detailed information on clinical management for Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) referral and diagnosis processes that are mandatory for child and adolescent mental health management. The analysis of ASD management, even if carried out on a selected sample of Child and Adolescent Mental Health (CAMH) units, represents a good approximation of how, in Italian outpatient settings, children and adolescents with ASD are recognised and eventually diagnosed. One of the aims of the study was to verify the adherence of Italian CAMH units to international recommendations for ASD referral and diagnosis and whether these processes can be traced using individual chart reports.

Autistic-Like Features in Visually Impaired Children: A Review of Literature and Directions for Future Research.

There remains great interest in understanding the relationship between visual impairment (VI) and autism spectrum disorder (ASD) due to the extraordinarily high prevalence of ASD in blind and visually impaired children. The broad variability across individuals and assessment methodologies have made it difficult to understand whether autistic-like symptoms shown by some children with VI might reflect the influence of the visual deficit, or represent a primary neurodevelopmental condition that occurs independently of the VI itself. In the absence of a valid methodology adapted for the visually impaired population, diagnosis of ASD in children with VI is often based on non-objective clinical impression, with inconclusive prevalence data.

Autism in Children With Cerebral and Peripheral Visual Impairment: Fact or Artifact?

The aim of this study was to evaluate the occurrence and clinical characteristics of autism spectrum disorder in visually impaired children. In total, 273 participants, 214 with cerebral causes of vision impairment and 59 with peripheral causes, were assessed using multiple assessment methods and adapted for individuals with vision loss. We found that autism spectrum disorder was more prevalent in the visually impaired compared to general population, and that the prevalence varied according to the type of visual disorder (2.

Social cognition in autism: Face tuning.

Faces convey valuable information for social cognition, effective interpersonal interaction, and non-verbal communication. Face perception is believed to be atypical in autism, but the origin of this deficit is controversial. Dominant featural face encoding is suggested to be responsible for face tuning scarcity.

Representation of survey and route spatial descriptions in children with nonverbal (visuospatial) learning disabilities.

This study aims to investigate the types of difficulty encountered by children with nonverbal (visuospatial) learning disabilities (NLD) during the processing of spatial information derived from descriptions. Two spatial descriptions--one in survey, one in route perspective--and one nonspatial description were orally presented to children aged 9-12 divided in three groups: (i) with NLD (N=12), (ii) with reading disability (RD) (N=11), and (iii) without learning disabilities who served as controls (N=16). Children performed two tasks: sentence verification and location.