(Press-News.org) A multi-site study sponsored by the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) finds young children with autism spectrum disorder and serious behavioral problems respond positively to a 24-week structured parent training. The benefits of parent training endured for up to six months post intervention.
Published in the April 21 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association the study found parent training was more effective in reducing disruptive and aggressive behavior than 24 weeks of parent education. Parent training provided parents with specific strategies on how to manage serious behavioral problems such as tantrums, aggression, self-injury and noncompliance in children with autism spectrum disorder. Parent education offered useful information on autism - but did not provide guidance on how to manage serious behavioral problems.
The lead author, Karen Bearss, PhD, assistant professor of pediatrics at Marcus Autism Center and Emory University School of Medicine remarked, "It's striking that children in both groups improved, but on measures of disruptive and noncompliant behavior, parent training was clearly better."
Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a chronic condition beginning in early childhood defined by impaired social communication and repetitive behavior. The disorder affects 0.6 to 1 percent of children worldwide. In young children, ASD is often complicated by serious behavioral problems such as tantrums, aggression, self-injury and severe noncompliance in response to routine environmental demands. These disruptive behaviors can be overwhelming for parents and foster profound uncertainty on how to handle these problems. There are approved medications for these disruptive behavioral problems, but parents of young children with ASD are often reluctant to use medication.
"This is the largest randomized trial of any behavioral intervention in children with autism spectrum disorder, and it shows that parent training works," notes Lawrence Scahill, MSN, PhD, professor of pediatrics at Marcus and Emory School of Medicine, who directed the study.
In the multi-site study, 180 children (age 3 to 7 years) with ASD and serious behavioral problems were randomly assigned to either 24 weeks of parent training or 24 weeks of parent education. Parent Training consisted of 11 core treatment sessions, two optional sessions, two telephone boosters, and two home visits. Parent Education included 12 core sessions and one home visit.
Parents in both treatments attended over 90 percent of treatment sessions, suggesting that parents were highly engaged in the study treatments. After 24 weeks of treatment, children in the parent-training group showed a 48 percent improvement on parent ratings of disruptive behavior compared to a 32 percent decline for parent education. Overall progress was rated by a clinician who was blind to treatment assignment. At week 24, 70 percent of children in the parent-training group showed a positive response, compared to 40 percent for parent education.
"This is a very important study for children and families with ASD. Parent training is known to be effective for children and adolescents with behavior problems, and is now demonstrated to be effective for children with ASD," commented John Walkup, MD, a child psychiatrist and professor of psychiatry at Weill-Cornell Medical College and New York-Presbyterian Hospital. Walkup, who was not involved in the study, added: "The magnitude of benefit is large given the active control group. It is also good news that the benefits of parent training build with time."
Parents of young children with ASD are inundated with an extraordinary range of treatments with claims and counter claims, but often little evidence. The study results suggest that accurate information alone is helpful to parents. Providing parents with practical strategies to manage serious behavioral problems improved parental readiness to deal with the daily challenges of raising a child with ASD above and beyond information alone.
Despite the increased recognition of ASD in young children, rigorous testing and dissemination of evidenced-based treatments has lagged far behind. The results of this study support the view that parent training is ready for export. The next step is to move toward wider application of this evidence-based intervention.
INFORMATION:
This study was conducted by the Research Units on Behavioral Intervention (RUBI) Autism Network, a six-site NIMH-funded consortium dedicated to developing and testing behavioral treatments for children with ASD. The other research sites included Indiana University, Ohio State University and Nationwide Children's Hospital, University of Pittsburgh, University of Rochester and Yale University. Researchers at Emory University and Yale University participated in data management and analysis. Funding support was also provided by the Marcus Foundation and the JB Whitehead Foundation.
Researchers from the University of Tokyo have revamped an old e-paper concept to make an inexpensive handwriting-enabled e-paper well suited to large displays like whiteboards. They describe the e-paper in the Journal of Applied Physics, from AIP Publishing.
Traditional ink and paper is convenient for both reading and writing. In e-paper development the writing feature has generally lagged behind. Handwriting-enabled displays mainly show up in the inexpensive, but feature-limited realm of children's toys, and in the high-end realm of touch-screen e-readers and smart ...
French teams from CIC Biothérapie (AP-HP/Inserm), from pediatric hematology department of Necker Hospital for Children (AP-HP), led by Marina Cavazzana, Salima Hacein Bey Albina and Alain Fischer and from Genethon led by Anne Galy (Genethon/Inserm UMR-S951), and English teams from UCL Institute of Child Health and Great Ormond Street Hospital in London led by Adrian Thrasher and Bobby Gaspar demonstrated the efficacy of gene therapy treatment for Wiskott-Aldrich Syndrome (WAS). Six children that were treated and followed for at least 9 months had their immune system ...
BOULDER, Colo. -- In another advance at the far
frontiers of timekeeping by National Institute of
Standards and Technology (NIST) researchers, the
latest modification of a record-setting strontium atomic
clock has achieved precision and stability levels that
now mean the clock would neither gain nor lose one
second in some 15 billion years*--roughly the age of
the universe.
Precision timekeeping has broad potential
impacts on advanced communications, positioning technologies (such as GPS) and many
other technologies. Besides keeping future technologies on schedule, ...
Scientists from the DFG Center for Regenerative Therapies Dresden, TU Dresden and the Institut für Diabetesforschung, Helmholtz Zentrum München, together with researchers from Vienna, Bristol and Denver (USA) have successfully completed the first step in development of an insulin vaccine to prevent type 1 diabetes.
As reported by these diabetes researchers in the current edition of the renowned scientific journal JAMA, evaluations of the international Pre-POINT study point to a positive immune response in persons at risk for the disease who were given oral doses ...
AURORA, Colo. (April 21, 2015) - The incidence of a potentially life-threatening complication of diabetes, called diabetic ketoacidosis, increased by 55 percent between 1998 and 2012 in youth in Colorado, according to a study by researchers from the Barbara Davis Center for Childhood Diabetes and the University of Colorado School of Medicine on the Anschutz Medical Campus.
The finding is published in the April 21 issue of JAMA.
Diabetic ketoacidosis (DKA) at the time of type 1 diabetes diagnosis has detrimental long-term effects and is characterized by dangerously high ...
AURORA, Colo. (April 21, 2015) - Children at risk for type 1 diabetes, who were given daily doses of oral insulin, developed a protective immune response to the disease that researchers with the Barbara Davis Center for Childhood Diabetes at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus say could possibly lay the groundwork for a vaccine against the chronic illness.
The pilot study, published Tuesday, April 21, in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), was carried out in the U.S., Germany, Austria and the United Kingdom.
"This is the first time ...
Sweet potatoes from all over the world naturally contain genes from the bacterium Agrobacterium. Researchers from UGent and the International Potato Institute publish this discovery in PNAS. Sweet potato is one of the most important food crops for human consumption in the world. Because of the presence of this 'foreign' DNA, sweet potato can be seen as a 'natural GMO.'
The researchers discovered the foreign DNA sequences of Agrobacterium while searching the genome - this is the entire DNA-code - of sweet potato for viral diseases. Instead of contributing this peculiar ...
Female liver cells, and in particular those in menopaused women, are more susceptible to adverse effects of drugs than their male counterparts, according to new research carried out by the JRC. It is well known that women are more vulnerable when it comes to drug-induced liver effects, but it's the first time it has been shown that there are differences at cellular level. The findings are striking and clinically relevant, and emphasise the importance of considering sex-based differences in human health risk assessment.
In this study, five prevalently used drugs (diclofenac, ...
WORCESTER, MA -- In a promising breakthrough for smokers who are trying to quit, neuroscientists at the University of Massachusetts Medical School and The Scripps Research Institute have identified circuitry in the brain responsible for the increased anxiety commonly experienced during withdrawal from nicotine addiction.
"We identified a novel circuit in the brain that becomes active during nicotine withdrawal, specifically increasing anxiety," said principal investigator Andrew Tapper, PhD , associate professor of psychiatry. "Increased anxiety is a prominent nicotine ...
Before web developers add the newest bells and the latest whistles to their website designs, a team of researchers suggests they zoom in on the tools that click with the right users and for the right tasks.
"When designers create sites, they have to make decisions on what tools and features they use and where they put them, which takes a lot of planning," said S. Shyam Sundar, Distinguished Professor of Communications and co-director of the Media Effects Research Laboratory. "You not only have to plan where the feature will be, you also have to design what will go underneath ...
