Parental reports on the prevalence of co-occurring intellectual disability among children with autism spectrum disorders☆
Section snippets
Participants
Participants were 498 parents and other caregivers of children with ASD.1 Most of them were mothers of focal children (88.8%); the rest were fathers (7.2%), stepmothers (1.0%),
Results
Among the entire sample, 46 families (9.2%) indicated that their children had MR. The prevalence was highest among those with an autism diagnosis (12.6%), followed by PDD-NOS (7.3%), then Asperger's disorder (1.7%). These numbers were significantly different among ASD diagnoses, as can be seen in Table 2. Frequencies of additional diagnoses within each ASD-diagnostic category are also provided. With the exception of MR, ADD/ADHD was the only other diagnosis that was reported at significantly
Discussion
The purpose of the current study was to determine how many parents of children with ASD would espouse MR – now referred to as ID – as an additional diagnosis for their children. Parents in the current sample reported an extremely low frequency of ID: 9.2% compared with recent clinical estimates ranging from 33.1% to 58.5% (ADDM, 2007). When children were grouped by type of ASD diagnosis, the prevalence of ID was greatest among those with autism—12.6%; however, this figure is still remarkably
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This paper was based on data collected as part of the first author's doctoral dissertation.