View clinical trials related to Autism Spectrum Disorders.
Filter by:The purpose of this study is examine emotional regulation and reflective functioning in parents of children with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) before and after an educational training (four sessions of group workshops). Our experimental aims are the following: 1) examine parental emotion regulation and reflective functioning in daily life, 2) examine child emotion regulation in their daily life 3)Learn about the training efficacy for ASD parents. This research study will help to formulate innovative treatment methods to reinforce positive emotion regulation and reflective functioning in both ASD children and their parents.
The SaLSA (Screening and Linkage to Services for Autism) study will test whether patient navigation can help disadvantaged families obtain earlier diagnosis and treatment for their children who have had a positive screening test for autism spectrum disorder. Half of the families will be offered help from an autism patient navigator. The other half will receive standard care.
The goal of the project is to better understand executive control-how children manage complex or conflicting information in the service of a goal. This skill has been linked to social and academic functioning in typically developing children. Executive control is often reduced in children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), but it has not been a focus of treatment. This project will have the goal of determining whether computer-training tasks developed to enhance the executive control skills of preschoolers and school-aged children without autism are appropriate for children with ASD. The investigators do not yet know if this training is beneficial for children with ASD. In addition, because executive control has been found to relate to social knowledge and problem solving, the investigators will collect information with this type of task to measure possible effects of training.
Specific Aim 1: Obtain proof of concept evidence that cortical metrics will change in response to treatment with Memantine extended release (XR)®, an agent that modulates n-methyl d-asptartate (NMDA) receptor activation, in children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) who clinically demonstrate treatment response. Hypothesis1: Children with ASD who have dramatic clinical response to Memantine XR® will exhibit changes in their cortical metrics, which will differ less from neurotypical children. Subjective ratings of improvement will be correlated with the change in cortical metrics. The completion of these aims will be essential to design a larger federally funded trial to validate cortical metrics as an outcome measure in a more heterogeneous pediatric ASD sample. Specifically, the feasibility data obtained may demonstrate the potential for detecting changes in cortical metrics over time, so that a larger grant could focus on determining how sensitive and clinically relevant changes in cortical metrics are or may indicate the need to explore different interventions to use in a validation study. We have chosen to use Memantine XR® because of its impact on NMDA neurotransmission, its current evaluation in a large multi-site randomized ASD clinical trial whose initial results are expected shortly, and our own observations of clinical improvements and good tolerability in the ongoing trial.
In this study, 50 children between 3 and 12 years old with formally diagnosed autistic spectrum disorders (ASD) and also having significant mitochondrial dysfunction will be treated for a 3 month period with the Mitochondrial Cocktail, a combination of specific nutritional supplements and metabolite intermediates (including anti-oxidants) and bio-energy substrates. A series of neurological and psychological evaluations will be conducted by trained evaluators/clinicians to evaluate both the severity and the clinical presentation of the ASD/mitochondrial dysfunction with each subject at baseline prior to treatment, after the 3 month treatment and again at 6 months, after another 3 month non-treatment period. In addition, laboratory investigations will be conducted at the same time-points to assess the mitochondrial dysfunction and cellular biomarkers thought to be associated with autistic and mitochondrial disorders. These investigations will include the analysis of samples of blood and cheek/buccal swabs collected from each child to assess select biochemical markers of ASD. The Mitochondrial Cocktail treatment will be administered at home once a day continuously for a total of 3 months. All the children in the study will be treated with the same Mitochondrial Cocktail (an open label study).
Young people between age 15 and 25 with ADHD and/or autism spectrum disorders are offered internet-based support and coaching during eight weeks (chat and e-mail). Data is collected before and after the intervention and six months after end of treatment using self-report questionnaires pertaining to sense of coherence, self-esteem, quality of life, depressive and anxiety symptoms and socioeconomic status. Parents complete an assessment scale for the next of kin. After treatment the young people are interviewed regarding the quality of the intervention. A comparison group matched for age, gender and neuropsychiatric diagnosis is offered treatment as usual and is assessed at the same time points as the intervention group. The individuals are not randomized due to difficulties to recruit if the individuals do not know group assignment in advance.
BACKGRUOUND: Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a common condition. The etiology of ASD remains unknown. Recent studies suggest a link between elimination diets and severity of autistic symptoms. The possible effects of a gluten-free diet (GFD) on symptoms remain unknown. AIM: The aim of the study is to evaluate the impact of gluten challenge on the autistic symptoms in children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) and on a gluten-free diet (GFD) in comparison to individuals continuing GFD. METHODS: 70 children with ASD aged 3-5 and 11/12 remaining on GFD for at least 8 weeks will be randomly assigned to gluten-free and gluten-challenge diet.
This is a Brazilian multisite study to test the efficacy of an Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA) parent training using video modeling to teach parents of children with Autism techniques to apply to their children in order to improve eye contact and joint attention behaviors. Our hypothesis is that children with Autism whose parents will be trained by videomodeling will have better eye contact and joint attention behaviors compared to children with Autism whose parents will not be trained.
The investigators overarching aim is to obtain preliminary data to support a larger grant to validate a novel objective, physiologically-based outcome measure for clinical trials in autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) called the cortical metric. Absence of such an outcome measure has greatly hindered the development of treatments for core symptoms of ASD.
The aims of the national population-based study on Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) include: (1) to understand the overall prevalence of ASD in children aged 6-12 years in 8 cities (n=120,000), (2) to explore environmental and genetic risk factors associated with ASD