Effect of screen time in the clinical outcome of therapy in children with Autism spectrum disorder and social communication disorder

Abstract

Children of present day are exposed to excessive screen time from a very young age itself. Among the factors which contribute to this is easy accessibility to gadgets, nuclear families with less support for childrearing due to parental preoccupation, etc. Though there are studies addressing the association between screen time and health effects, there isn’t’ any study addressing the effect of screen time on progress of therapy session in children with special needs, especially Autism or social communication disorders. For the present study, we enrolled children between 2-5years with ASD / SCD and assessed their initial problems and improvement post interventions with ATEC scoring. They were questioned about the screen time their children were exposed initially as well as at the end of training duration and were grouped as <1 hour and >1 hour. Following complete assessment using all the required tools, the children were given all the required standardised therapies according to our unit protocol for ASD and SCD, respectively. This includes sessions of Occupational therapy, speech therapy, ABA, etc. for 6 months. The effect of the sessions in the form of improvement in ATEC scores- total and individual domain scores of both ASD and SCD children were correlated with the screen time exposure and assessed for significance. 70 % of the kids with special needs (ASD& SCD) had media exposure >1 hours in the first year itself and were continuing at >2 hour/day. The present study showed that screen time has significant negative influence affecting improvement following therapies in both ASD and SCD. But ASD children seem to be more affected than SCD. ATEC scoring may be used in both ASD and SCD for follow-up assessment. However, this may require a larger sample for further validation. We caution the use of low quality Screen media intervention in therapy sessions or home for engaging these 2 groups of children.