D. Sauvage

Autism and family home movies: Preliminary findings

Preliminary analyses of 12 home movies taken by parents before the recognition of autistic disorders of their own child confirm the major value of this method for describing early signs: anomalies of eye contact, deficient variability of emotional expression, defect of attention and initiation of communication, motor abnormalities, etc. The possibilities of subsequently using these documents in a research context are described: behavior assignment with a rating scale, comparative analysis with movies of normal children, blind examination, and scoring by investigators not informed of the diagnosis.

Validity and Reliability of the Infant Behavioral Summarized Evaluation (IBSE): A Rating Scale for the Assessment of Young Children with Autism and Developmental Disorders.

The Infant Behavioral Summarized Evaluation (IBSE) is a rating scale adapted from the Behavioral Summarized Evaluation (BSE) and specifically related to the assessment of behaviors of young children having autistic disorders. Content validity and reliability studies described in the paper were made from behavior ratings of videotapes for 89 children aged from 6 to 48 months. Results show a significant group of 19 items including some characteristic early autistic behaviors (communicative and social abnormalities) and some that are less commonly described in the syndrome (attentional, perceptive, and adaptive disorders). The value of the use of this scale for clinicians and professionals involved in behavioral evaluations and treatment of young children with developmental disorders and the necessity for further psychometric investigations are discussed.

The Behavioral Summarized Evaluation: Validity and Reliability of a Scale for the Assessment of Autistic Behaviors.

The Behavioral Summarized Evaluation (BSE), is a 20-item paper- and-pencil rating scale specifically designed for the measurement of behavioral parameters which could be related to biological data in autistic children involved in educational programs, neurophysiological studies, and therapeutic trials. The development of the scale, the validity, and reliability studies are presented in this paper. The results suggest that the BSE is an acceptable tool for the assessment of autistic behaviors, easy to handle, and accessible to both professionals and paraprofessionals of the medico-educative staff. It is a useful addition to the bioclinical researchers evaluation battery for bioclinical and therapeutic studies. However, more work is suggested to further investigate the psychometric properties of this behavior assessment instrument.

The Presence or Absence of Certain Behaviors Associated with Infantile Autism in Severely Retarded Autistic and Nonautistic Retarded Children and Very Young Normal Children.

The modified Behavior Observation Scale adapted from Freeman et al. was used to compare normal, retarded, and autistic children with very low developmental ages and to determine the types of behavior that could differentiate these three diagnostic categories of children. Examination of the data revealed that there was much more overlap between autistic and retarded children than between autistic and normal children. However, a behavioral pattern of autism could be delineated and very retarded autistic children could be distinguished from the nonautistic retarded children. The autistic behavioral pattern included subclusters of symptoms that might be interpreted as disturbances of sensory modulation and motility.

CATECHOLAMINERGIC METABOLISM AND AUTISM

The authorS determined levels of dopamine: (DA) and its derivatives homovanillic acid (HVA), 3–4 dihydrouyphenylacetic. acid (DOPAC), 3 methosytyramine and norepinephrine + epinephrine (KE + E) in the urine. and DA, E and NE in the whole blood of 50 autistic children aged between I year 11 months and 16 years. An association was tested for between markers coding for the enzymes and D3 dopaminergic receptor genes implicated in the monoaminergic pathway and autism. using restriction fragment‐length polymorphism. There were significant modifications of catecholamine metabolites, but n o difference for allele frequencies of the genes coding for tyrosine hydroxylase, dopamine beta hydroxylase and DRD3 in this population compared with a healthy school population matched for chronological age. However, some of the data encourage a more complete study of chromosome 11.

A comparison of autistic syndromes with and without associated neurological problems

ConclusionsThe findings show that autistic syndromes with and without associated neurological deficits are remarkably similar in terms of severity and type of autistic symptoms, IQ, and sex distribution. Children with an associated neurological disorder tended to have had autistic features from birth, but this may have been an artifact resulting from the closer clinical observation that many would have received because of their medical problems. Findings from related studies have also shown that autistic syndromes with and without neurological deficits do not differ with respect to urinary homovanillic acid levels (Garreau et al., 1980), dihydroxy-phenylacetic acid levels (Landgrebe & Landgrebe, 1976), auditory evoked potentials (Martineau, Garreau, Barthelemy, Callaway, & LeLord, 1981) or response to vitamin B6 administration (LeLord et al., 1981; Martineau et al., 1981).

Disorders of regulation of cognitive activity in autistic children

Infantile autism is a pervasive developmental disorder characterized by disturbances concerning not only the areas of socialization and communication (“aloneness”) but also the ability to modify and change behavior (“need for sameness”). In most recent studies, various abnormal and deviant cognitive activities, such as the ability to regulate ones behavior, were considered as accounting for these signs. In this report, we examined the regulation of cognitive activity, from a developmental perspective in comparing autistic with mentally retarded children matched in a pairwise manner by global, verbal, and nonverbal developmental ages. All children were tested with tasks adapted from the Object Permanence Test which corresponds to Piagets sensorimotor development Stages IV to VI. Results showed that autistic children had a pervasive difficulty in maintenance set, made more perseverative errors when the abstraction degree of task was higher, and were more variable in their behavioral strategies. Discussion is focused on the interests and limits of these tasks for the examination of regulation activity from diagnostic and developmental perspectives. Finally, interpretations about recent neuropsychological and neurophysiological works, and additional interdisciplinary studies are suggested.

Comparison of Clinical Diagnoses and Rimland E2 Scores in Severely Disturbed Children.

The Rimland E2 questionnaire was applied to three groups of children for whom clinical diagnoses of Infantile Autism, Autism with Associated Symptoms, and Mental Retardation had been made, as well as to normal controls. The results confirm that the Rimland scale is accurate in differentiating autistic from nonautistic children. But the scale does not appear to permit clear differentiation of infantile autism from autism with associated symptoms, and the more typical autistic children (diagnosed as Kanners EIA) did not all yield high scores. Several possible explanations for this fact are put forward.

Lack of association between three genetic markers of brain growth factors and infantile autism

The aim of this study was to explore two markers of the Insuline (INS) gene and one marker of the Insuline-Like Growth Factor 2 (IGF2) gene by Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) in larger samples of autistic and control children