L’hétérogénéité du développement cognitif et socio-émotionnel d’enfants atteints de trouble du spectre de l’autisme en lien avec la sévérité des troubles

Abstract

Aim and backgroundIn a developmental psychopathology perspective, it considers that children with autism spectrum disorders present a heterogeneous cognitive and socio-emotional developmental profile. Furthermore it was already demonstrated that the severity of autistic disorders had an incidence on the cognitive and adaptive skills of these children. So the current study investigate cognitive and socio-emotional developmental profile of intellectual disability and autistic children from several countries (Algeria, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, France, Greece and Spain) and to analyse peculiarities. MethodsA sample of 130 children with both autism (CIM-10, DSM-IV-TR and Childhood Autism Rating Scale) and developmental delay were studied with retrospective and prospective methods of assessment. They range in age from 3 to approximately 10 years, with an average of 5 years and 7 months (sex-ratio=3.5:1). Individuals were tested using the Social Cognitive Evaluation Battery (SCEB) by trained psychologists from public and private institutions specialized in diagnosis and intervention in autism. The Social Cognitive Evaluation Battery is a pertinent instrument for the developmental assessment of autistic children with a developmental age of less than 2 years and permits assess sixteen functional abilities in cognition and socio-emotional domains (self-image, symbolic play, object-relation schemata, operational causality, means aims, spatial relations, object permanence, behaviour regulation, social interaction, joint attention, expressive and comprehensive language, vocal and gesture imitation, affective relation, emotional expression). ResultsThe analysis with Pearson correlation coefficients highlights a link between levels of development, heterogeneous and severity of autism. So children with greater autism spectrum disorder severity were more likely to present with fewer level of development and more heterogeneous at the Social Cognitive Evaluation Battery. On the other hand, the more level of development is high, the more heterogeneous is low. ConclusionThe developmental profiles of autism spectrum disorder and intellectual disability children were very heterogeneous and specially correlated to the severity of the disorders. The results suggest that fifth American psychiatric classification with level severity categories is adapted. The identification of developmental profile of these children is very important to improve comprehension of syndrome and adapt the intervention.