Comorbid Anxiety Symptoms in Children with Pervasive Developmental Disorders
Section snippets
Method
Participants were 59 children from the database (1993, 1994, and 1995) of the Centre of Autism South-Limburg, the Netherlands. These children had undergone extensive psychodiagnostic and psychiatric screening and were classified on the basis of DSM-III-R criteria (American Psychiatric Association, 1987) as either having AD or “pervasive developmental disorder not otherwise specified” (PDDNOS). Diagnoses had been made by the specialized, multidisciplinary team of professionals of the Centre of
Results
The average interview lasted for 63.3 minutes (SD = 23.2, range = 30–120). In most cases, the mother provided information on the anxiety symptoms of the child (n = 31). In other cases, both parents (n = 9), the father (n = 1), the grandmother (n = 1), or the social worker of the institution in which the child resided (n = 2) were interviewed.
Table 1 shows the number (percentage) of children who fulfilled DSM-III-R criteria for the separate anxiety disorders. On the whole, 37 of 44 PDD children
Discussion
Given the paucity of research on anxiety symptoms in autism, the current study examined the prevalence of comorbid anxiety symptoms in a sample of PDD children. The main results can be summarized as follows. First, severe anxiety symptoms were highly prevalent among these children. That is, 84.1% met the full DSM-III-R criteria of at least one anxiety disorder. Second, 72.7% of the PDD children exhibited ritualistic behaviors.
Percentages of PDD children who fulfilled the diagnostic criteria for
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2022, Clinical Psychology ReviewCitation Excerpt :The data as generated do not conclusively point to affect dysregulation as a causal factor in etiology of SIB, but the strong association between emotional hyper-responsiveness and prevalence of SIB should be further investigated in I/DD. This is underscored by observations that upward to approximately 50% of children with autism exhibit clinically significant levels of anxiety (Kim, Szatmari, Bryson, Streiner, & Wilson, 2000; Muris, Steerneman, Merckelbach, Holdrinet, & Meesters, 1998; Sukhodolsky et al., 2008; Weisbrot, Gadow, DeVincent, & Pomeroy, 2005), but to our knowledge no study has identified whether anxiety and SIB reliably co-occur in pediatric I/DD/ASD samples. Overall, across the different bio-behavioral investigations and conceptual issues and models reviewed briefly above, there has been no real attempt to incorporate then intentionally within an epidemiological framework as we adopted for this systematic literature review.
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