The impact of bilingual exposure on language learning has not been systematically studied in children with Autism Spectrum Disorders. This study compared the social abilities and language levels of ...children (mean age = 56 months) with ASDs from bilingual (n = 45) and monolingual (n = 30) environments. Bilingually-exposed children were subgrouped based on simultaneous bilingual exposure from infancy (SIM, n = 24) versus sequential post-infancy bilingual exposure (SEQ, n = 21). Despite significantly different amounts of bilingual exposure across all groups (
p
= <0.001) and significantly stronger social interaction scores in the SIM group compared to the SEQ group on the Vineland Adaptive Behavior Scales-II Interpersonal subdomain (
p
= 0.025), there were no significant group differences in language level. Bilingually-exposed children with ASDs did not experience additional delays in language development.
Evaluation of environmental risk factors in the development of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is needed for a more complete understanding of disease etiology and best approaches for prevention, ...diagnosis, and treatment. A pilot experiment in 54 children (n = 25 ASD, n = 29 controls; aged 12.4 ± 3.9 years) screened for 87 urinary mycotoxins via liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry to assess current exposure. Zearalenone, zearalenone-4-glucoside, 3-acetyldeoxynivalenol, and altenuene were detected in 9/54 (20%) samples, most near the limit of detection. No mycotoxin/group of mycotoxins was associated with ASD-diagnosed children. To identify potential correlates of mycotoxin presence in urine, we further compared the nine subjects where a urinary mycotoxin was confirmed to the remaining 45 participants and found no difference based on the presence or absence of mycotoxin for age (t-test; p = 0.322), gender (Fisher's exact test; p = 0.456), exposure or not to selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (Fisher's exact test; p = 0.367), or to other medications (Fisher's exact test; p = 1.00). While no positive association was found, more sophisticated sample preparation techniques and instrumentation, coupled with selectivity for a smaller group of mycotoxins, could improve sensitivity and detection. Further, broadening sampling to in utero (mothers) and newborn-toddler years would cover additional exposure windows.
The question of what constitutes the most appropriate control group in child psychopathology research remains a vexed question as well as one of the most common issues raised in the referees’ reports ...I read as an editor of JCPP. Yet its importance is often overlooked by authors as they reflect on potential sources of bias in their studies. There is an abundant literature on this question (Rothman, Greenland, & Lash, 2008) that highlights the key issues and pitfalls for research in our field.
All families experience financial and time costs related to caring for their children's health. Understanding the economic burden faced by families of children with chronic health conditions (CHC) is ...crucial for designing effective policies to support families.
In this prospective study we used electronic health records to identify children between 3 and 17 years old with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), asthma, or neither (control) from three Kaiser Permanente regions and several community health centers in the OCHIN network. We oversampled children from racial and ethnic minority groups. Parent/guardian respondents completed surveys three times, approximately four months apart. The surveys included the Family Economic Impact Inventory (measuring financial, time, and employment costs of caring for a child's health), and standardized measures of children's quality of life, behavioral problems, and symptom severity for children with ASD or asthma. We also assessed parenting stress and parent physical and mental health. All materials were provided in English and Spanish.
Of the 1,461 families that enrolled (564 ASD, 468 asthma, 429 control), children were predominantly male (79%), with a mean age of 9.0 years, and racially and ethnically diverse (43% non-Hispanic white; 22% Hispanic; 35% Asian, Black, Native Hawaiian, or another race/ethnicity). The majority of survey respondents were female (86%), had a college degree (62%), and were married/partnered (79%). ASD group respondents were less likely to be employed (73%) than those in the asthma or control groups (both 80%; p = .023). Only 32% of the control group reported a household income ≤ $4,000/month compared with 41% of asthma and 38% of ASD families (p = .006).
Utilizing a novel measure assessing family economic burden, we successfully collected survey responses from a large and diverse sample of families. Drawing upon the conceptual framework, survey measures, and self-report data described herein we will conduct future analyses to examine the economic burdens related to CHC and the incremental differences in these burdens between health groups. This information will help policy makers to design more equitable health and social policies that could reduce the burden on families.
Purpose
Food insecurity has been found to be related to anxiety and depression; however, the association with other psychiatric disorders, particularly among young adults, is not well known. We ...examined whether food insecurity is independently associated with four common mental health problems among a community sample of young adults in France.
Methods
Data are from the TEMPO longitudinal cohort study. In 1991, participants’ parents provided information on health and family socioeconomic characteristics. In 2011, participants’ (18–35 years) reported food insecurity, mental health symptoms, and socioeconomic conditions (
n
= 1214). Mental health problems ascertained included major depressive episode, suicidal ideation, attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder, and substance abuse and/or dependence (nicotine, alcohol and cannabis). Cross-sectional associations between food insecurity and mental health problems were tested using modified Poisson regressions, weighted by inverse probability weights (IPW) of exposure. This makes food insecure and not food insecure participants comparable on all characteristics including socioeconomic factors and past mental health problems.
Results
8.5 % of young adults were food insecure. In IPW-controlled analyses, food insecurity was associated with increased levels of depression (RR = 2.01, 95 % CI 1.01–4.02), suicidal ideation (RR = 3.23, 95 % CI 1.55–6.75) and substance use problems (RR = 1.68, 95 % CI 1.15–2.46).
Conclusions
Food insecurity co-occurs with depression, suicidal ideation and substance use problems in young adulthood. Our findings suggest that reductions in food insecurity during this important life period may help prevent mental health problems. Policies aiming to alleviate food insecurity should also address individuals’ psychiatric problems, to prevent a lifelong vicious circle of poor mental health and low socioeconomic attainment.
Conversational impairments are well known among people with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), but their measurement requires time-consuming manual annotation of language samples. Natural language ...processing (NLP) has shown promise in identifying semantic difficulties when compared to clinician-annotated reference transcripts. Our goal was to develop a novel measure of lexico-semantic similarity - based on recent work in natural language processing (NLP) and recent applications of pseudo-value analysis - which could be applied to transcripts of children's conversational language, without recourse to some ground-truth reference document. We hypothesized that: (a) semantic coherence, as measured by this method, would discriminate between children with and without ASD and (b) more variability would be found in the group with ASD. We used data from 70 4- to 8-year-old males with ASD (
= 38) or typically developing (TD;
= 32) enrolled in a language study. Participants were administered a battery of standardized diagnostic tests, including the Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule (ADOS). ADOS was recorded and transcribed, and we analyzed children's language output during the conversation/interview ADOS tasks. Transcripts were converted to vectors
a word2vec model trained on the Google News Corpus. Pairwise similarity across all subjects and a sample grand mean were calculated. Using a leave-one-out algorithm, a pseudo-value, detailed below, representing each subject's contribution to the grand mean was generated. Means of pseudo-values were compared between the two groups. Analyses were co-varied for nonverbal IQ, mean length of utterance, and number of distinct word roots (NDR). Statistically significant differences were observed in means of pseudo-values between TD and ASD groups (
0.007). TD subjects had higher pseudo-value scores suggesting that similarity scores of TD subjects were more similar to the overall group mean. Variance of pseudo-values was greater in the ASD group. Nonverbal IQ, mean length of utterance, or NDR did not account for between group differences. The findings suggest that our pseudo-value-based method can be effectively used to identify specific semantic difficulties that characterize children with ASD without requiring a reference transcript.
Abstract Youths whose parents smoke tobacco may be at elevated risk of smoking themselves. However, the association between parental long-term smoking history and offspring regular tobacco use is not ...well known. Using data collected on 1121 youths (12–26 years) participating in the GAZEL Youth study, a French community-based cohort, we tested the association between parental long-term smoking trajectory and offspring regular smoking. Parental smoking trajectory over 11 years (1989–1999) was measured by yearly reports obtained from the parent. Statistical analyses controlled for youth's sex, age, alcohol use and disruptive behavioral problems, parent's sex, as well as family socioeconomic position. Overall, 27% of study youths smoked regularly. Compared to offspring of non-smokers, those of persistent smokers had twofold smoking rates (age and sex-adjusted OR: 1.91, 95% CI: 1.30–2.79, fully-adjusted OR: 1.96, 95% CI: 1.31–2.93). Additionally, persistent parental smoking predicted offspring heavy smoking and early smoking initiation. Overall, maternal smoking was more strongly associated with youths’ regular smoking than paternal smoking (fully-adjusted ORs: 3.12, 95% 1.58–6.16 vs. 1.47, 95% 0.87–2.49). These results suggest that efforts to decrease the burden of tobacco smoking among youths may be more efficient if focused on families rather than on individuals.
There is a growing need for multicultural collaboration in child mental health services, training, and research. To facilitate such collaboration, this study tested the 8-syndrome structure of the ...Child Behavior Checklist (CBCL) in 30 societies. Parents' CBCL ratings of 58,051 6- to 18-year-olds were subjected to confirmatory factor analyses, which were conducted separately for each society. Societies represented Asia; Africa; Australia; the Caribbean; Eastern, Western, Southern, and Northern Europe; the Middle East; and North America. Fit indices strongly supported the correlated 8-syndrome structure in each of 30 societies. The results support use of the syndromes in diverse societies.
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