[Hippotherapy in the paedopsychiatric care project].

Hippotherapy uses relationships with horses as a mediation method. The care treatment aims to act on the psychological functioning of children affected by relational disorders, especially in order to help the development of communication and emotions. A partnership has been established between the paedopsychiatric university centre at the CHRU in Tours (37) and a horse-riding centre.

[Further clinical evaluations elicited by functional biological investigations in childhood autism].

As childhood autism is usually considered as a developmental disorder, complete assessment of each patient requires non only clinical examination but various biological investigations: EEG and evoked potentials recordings, biochemical dosages and sometimes, cerebral blood flow measures, molecular biologic explorations...

Validation of the Revised Behavior Summarized Evaluation Scale.

The Behavioral Summarized Evaluation scale (BSE), previously published and validated, was developed for the evaluation for the autistic behavior in developmentally disorder children. A revised version of this scale, the Revised Behavior Summarized Evaluation Scale (BSE-R) completed the 20-item BSE scale with the most relevant items extracted from a similar evaluation carried out with very young children. Thus 9 items were added to the original scale concerning nonverbal communication, emotional, and perception areas.

Quantified multidimensional assessment of autism and other pervasive developmental disorders. Application for bioclinical research.

A large number of investigation techniques are used to establish the relationships between the clinical and biological data which are necessary for physiopathological analysis in the field of developmental disorders. It therefore seemed necessary to develop a quantified grouping system, based on developmental assessments, which could allow closer matching between clinical evaluations and biological numerical data. Two hundred and two subjects presenting developmental disorders (autistic disorder, pervasive developmental disorder not otherwise specified and mental retardation) were examined.

Association study with two markers of a human homeogene in infantile autism.

Epidemiological data and family studies in autism show that there is a genetic susceptibility factor in the aetiology of this syndrome. We carried out an association study in infantile autism. Two markers of the homeogene EN2 involved in cerebellar development were tested in a population of 100 autistic children and in a population of 100 control children.