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Brief Report: Characteristics of preschool children with ASD vary by ascertainment

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Abstract

Prospective studies of infant siblings of children diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) provide a unique opportunity to characterize ASD as it unfolds. A critical question that remains unanswered is whether and how these children with ASD resemble other children identified from the community, including those with no family history. The purpose of this study was to compare clinical characteristics of children with ASD identified by each method (n = 86 per group), drawn from two Canadian longitudinal research cohorts. Children ascertained from a prospective cohort were less severely affected and included a larger proportion of girls, compared to the clinically referred sample. These results may have important implications for conclusions drawn from studies of high-risk and clinically referred cohorts.

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Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank the research assistants at each site for their help with data collection and the parents and children who participated in our study. The study was funded by Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) and NeuroDevNet.

Author Contributions

LRS made substantial contributions to conception and design of the paper, analyzed the data, and prepared the first draft of the paper, and approved the final draft. LZ, PS, SB, SG, JB, IMS, TV, NG, CR, ME contributed to the conception of the project, provided a critical review of the manuscript, and approved the final draft.

Funding

This study was funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) and NeuroDevNet.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Pediatrics, University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB, Canada

    Lori-Ann R. Sacrey & Lonnie Zwaigenbaum

  2. Autism Research Centre—E209, Glenrose Rehabilitation Hospital, 10230-111 Avenue, Edmonton, AB, T5G 0B7, Canada

    Lori-Ann R. Sacrey & Lonnie Zwaigenbaum

  3. University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada

    Peter Szatmari, Jessica Brian & Caroline Roncadin

  4. The Hospital for Sick Children, Toronto, ON, Canada

    Peter Szatmari

  5. Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, Toronto, ON, Canada

    Peter Szatmari

  6. Dalhousie University/IWK Health Centre, Halifax, NS, Canada

    Susan Bryson & Isabel M. Smith

  7. McMaster Univeristy, Hamilton, ON, Canada

    Stelios Georgiades

  8. Bloorview Research Institute, Toronto, ON, Canada

    Jessica Brian

  9. University of Ottawa, Ottawa, ON, Canada

    Tracy Vaillancourt

  10. Mount Allison University, Sackville, NB, Canada

    Nancy Garon

  11. McMaster Children’s Hospital/Hamilton Health Sciences, Hamilton, ON, Canada

    Caroline Roncadin

  12. McGill University, Montreal, QC, Canada

    Mayada Elsabbagh

Authors
  1. Lori-Ann R. Sacrey
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  2. Lonnie Zwaigenbaum
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  3. Peter Szatmari
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  4. Susan Bryson
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  5. Stelios Georgiades
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  6. Jessica Brian
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  7. Isabel M. Smith
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  8. Tracy Vaillancourt
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  9. Nancy Garon
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  10. Caroline Roncadin
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  11. Mayada Elsabbagh
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Lori-Ann R. Sacrey.

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Conflict of interest

All of the authors declare that they have no conflicts of interest.

Ethical approval

All of the procedures involving our human participants were performed in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional boards at each institution and with the 1964 Declaration of Helsinki and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards. This article does not contain any studies with animals performed by any of the authors.

Informed consent

Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants (parents) prior to study onset.

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Supplementary material 1 (DOCX 134 KB)

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Sacrey, LA.R., Zwaigenbaum, L., Szatmari, P. et al. Brief Report: Characteristics of preschool children with ASD vary by ascertainment. J Autism Dev Disord 47, 1542–1550 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-017-3062-z

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-017-3062-z

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