Autistic mannerisms reduced by sensory treatment

Interpreting the child’s behavior as intentional and controllable and not recognizing the underlying cause and hypersensitivities is common in educational and home settings, but is an approach that Kinnealey discourages as stressful for the child.

The study took place this past summer at a camp near Allentown, Pa., for children with autism. Participants were between the ages of 6 and 12 years old and diagnosed with autism or Pervasive Developmental Disorder–Not Otherwise Specified (PDD-NOS).

One group (17) received traditional fine motor therapy and the other group (20) received sensory integration therapy. Each child received 18 treatment sessions over a period of six weeks.

A statistician randomly assigned the participants to groups; this information was provided to the project coordinator at the site. The primary researchers were blinded to group assignment and served as evaluators before and after the study.

Parents were also blinded to the interventions that their children were assigned to and were not on site. However, there was the potential for the verbal children to talk about the activities that they participated in, which may have influenced the blinding for the parents.

For their outcome data, researchers used a series of scales that measure behavior. While both groups showed significant improvements, the children in the sensory integration group showed more progress in specific areas at the end of the study.

“This pilot study provided a foundation for how we should design randomized control trials for sensory integration interventions with larger sample sizes,” Pfeiffer said. “Specifically, it identified issues with measurement such as the sensitivity of evaluation tools to measure changes in this population.

“Sensory integration treatment is a widely used intervention in occupational therapy. There is a real need for research such as randomized control trials to validate what we are doing with sensory integration in the profession,” she added.

The other presenter was Kristie Koenig, Ph.D., OTR/L, Steinhardt School of Culture, Education and Human Development, New York University. Funding was provided by Autism Speaks, which is dedicated to funding global biomedical research into the causes, prevention, treatments, and cure for autism and raising public awareness about autism and its effects on individuals, families, and society.