View clinical trials related to Autistic Disorders Spectrum.
Filter by:The goal of this clinical trial is to learn about the journey of families after their child's diagnosis of autism and to help parents understand autism and get the right treatments for their child. This study is for parents of children just diagnosed with autism who are: - Age greater than 1 and up to 5 years old; - Hispanic/Latino OR Black/African-American OR have Medi-Cal as primary health insurance; AND - Live in one of the following counties in California (Alameda, Contra Costa, Marin, Monterey, Napa, San Benito, San Francisco, San Mateo, Santa Clara, Santa Cruz, Solano, or Sonoma). The main questions it aims to answer are: - Whether parent coaching through Project AFECT leads to decreased parental stress and increased parental confidence; - Whether family navigation through Project AFECT leads to increased number of referrals to early intervention and educational services and reduced wait times to autism treatments; - Whether children whose parents receive Project AFECT intervention show increased language skills compared to children whose parents did not receive intervention. Participants will be asked to: - Complete surveys at enrollment and 3 and 6 months later. - Work with Project AFECT Coach. Researchers will compare control and intervention groups to see if Project AFECT leads to improved parent and child outcomes.
This study aims to establish a cognitive-behavior therapy (CBT) based virtual exposure (VR) exposure program to train ASD adults coping with everyday sensory scenarios. Through the practice and training, the ASD participants may learn the strategy to deal with the common sensory scenarios and master the anxiety around the exposure. The anticipatory anxiety and the maladaptive behaviors may be decreased along with the process of desensitization, while the functional impairment related to sensory sensitivity can partly be recovered.
Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by disturbances in communication, poor social skills, and aberrant behaviors. Particularly detrimental are the presence of restricted and repetitive stereotyped behaviors and uncontrollable temper outbursts over trivial changes in the environment, which often cause emotional stress for the children, their families, schools and neighborhood communities. Fundamental to these cognitive and behavioral problems is the disordered cortical connectivity and resultant executive dysfunction that underpin the use of effective strategies to integrate information across contexts. Brain connectivity problems affect the rate at which information travels across the brain. Slow processing speed relates to a reduced capacity of executive function to recall and formulate thoughts and actions automatically, with the result that autistic children with poor processing speed have great difficulty learning or perceiving relationships across multiple experiences. In consequence, these children compensate for the impaired ability to integrate information from the environment by memorizing visual details or individual rules from each situation. This explains why children with autism tend to follow routines in precise detail and show great distress over seemingly trivial changes in the environment. To date, there is no known cure for ASD, and the disorder remains a highly disabling condition. Recently, a non-invasive brain stimulation technique, transcranial direct current Stimulation (tDCS) has shown great promise as a potentially effective and costeffective tool for reducing core symptoms such as anxiety, aggression, impulsivity, and inattention in patients with autism. This technique has been shown to modify behavior by inducing changes in cortical excitability and enhancing connectivity between the targeted brain areas. However, not all ASD patients respond to this intervention the same way and predicting the behavioral impact of tDCS in patients with ASD remains a clinical challenge. This proposed study thus aims to address these challenges by determining whether resting-state EEG and clinical data at baseline can be used to differentiate responders from non-responders to tDCS treatment. Findings from the study will provide new guidance for designing intervention programs for individuals with ASD.
The goal of this study is to characterize biophysiolgoical signals as a comprehensive profile of the nervous systems in order to understand interactions between the brain and body, while an individual performs naturalistic behaviors (ex. walking, pointing) and while breathing at a slow controlled pace. The investigators aim to study these interactions among a variety of populations, from healthy individuals to those with disorders such as Autism Spectrum Disorder(s), including those who may also have an ADHD (Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder) diagnosis, Asperger's Syndrome, Alzheimer's Disease, and/or Fragile X syndrome
The WHO defines sexual health as a state of physical, emotional, mental and social well-being, related to sexuality, not only the absence of illness, dysfunction or disability. To acquire and maintain adequate sexual health, the sexual rights of all people must be respected, protected and fully exercised. People with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) present difficulties in the development of social interaction skills, among other problems that directly affect their sexual health. The consolidated prejudices and social myths related to the sexual affectivity of people with ASD, and in general to people with intellectual diversity, have meant that they do not pay any attention to the sexual health of this group in the assessment of their needs. Main objectives: to understand the experience lived by young people with ASD and their caregivers in relation to the affective needs during adolescence and to know the cognitive and behavioral expression of the affective dimension of adolescents with ASD. Mixed simultaneous design: qualitative based on the phenomenological paradigm, in order to establish the perceived needs of young adults with ASD, their families and the professionals who attend them, with the realization of focus groups and in-depth interviews. The second quantitative part will be developed in adolescents (12-18 years) and their families, evaluating the habitual behaviors and difficulties of Interaction in the affective expression, by means of questionnaires and self-administered scales. It will be necessary to sign the Informed Consent by all the participants, with the specific acceptance of the project by the CEIC of the investigator's center.
The project highlights one of the primary areas of research within the KIDDRC— language and communication. The focus is on language and communication in children with autism and minimal verbal skills (less than 20 spoken words). Remaining nonverbal past the age of 5 years has been considered a poor prognostic indicator for future language developments, yet few interventions have been developed to address this problem. The Specific Aims for this project are (1) to further investigate a multimodal intervention for school-age children with minimal verbal skills—defined as less than 20 words spontaneously spoken, signed, or selected via graphic symbol selection—and (2) to identify significant covariates associated with differential responding to the intervention. The research addresses an unmet need to promote spoken word production in children who remain essentially nonverbal well past the ages associated with speech acquisition. The project is also innovative because: a) it investigates a multimodal intervention based on principles of phonotactic probability and neighborhood density in combination with augmentative and alternative communication (AAC), and b) it investigates novel predictors of treatment response that are obtained through cutting-edge technologies. This intervention will have better success than past interventions because the intervention will provide increased input through speech, digitized speech and visual images and additional speech sound practice for words that are comprised of high frequency sounds in the child's repertoire. Extant speech sounds in each participant's repertoire will be identified using LENA™ digitized recordings. Vocabulary words will then be selected based on a child's speech sound repertoire and principles of word learning—words with high probability speech sound sequences will be selected and taught with either multimodal intervention or a treatment as usual condition. Responses to these interventions will be evaluated using a Sequential Multiple Assignment Randomized Trials (SMART) design. Different outcomes may be associated with individual and environmental predictors identified in our previous research. Individual predictors include verbal comprehension, imitation skills, adaptive behavior, nonverbal speech sound repertoire, and communication complexity. Communication complexity will be measured with the Communication Complexity Scale (CCS), developed by the Principal Investigator. Environmental predictors include language input to the child as measured with LENA™ recording devices. Results will determine if the multimodal intervention is more successful than treatment as usual for teaching word productions.