A case-control evaluation of sensory profile among preschool children affected by autism spectrum disorder

Background: Autism spectrum disorders (ASD) are neurobehavioral syndromes caused by a developmental disorder, biologically determined, with a very early onset and deficit mainly related to social communication and interaction.There is a considerable amount of literature on ASD suggesting abnormal sensory experience as a basic symptom, as also reported by the DSM-5 and ICD-10.The current case-control study aimed to investigate the sensory perception skills in preschool children affected by ASD compared with a control group of typical developing children.Materials and methods: The study sample was composed of 42 children, subdivided into two groups: 21 ASD (12 males); 21 typical developing (TDC) (10 males). All partcipants underwent the Bogdashina's Sensory Profile Checklist Revised (SPCR) to evaluate sensory perceptual abilities. ASD performance on SPCR was compared to TDC's.Results: Individuals with ASD, showed significantly higher scores in all perception areas than TDC, except for the smell sub-scale, where the two groups were similar. The Cohen's d distribution showed a greater effect for vision, hearing, touch, vestibular and proprioception scales and a medium effect for smell scale.Conclusions: ASD subjects have an abnormal interaction between auditory and somatosensory modalities, probably linked to a dysfunctional interaction between auditory and somatosensory systems associated with abnormal involvement of the non-classical auditory pathways. In this light, ASD children and adolescents present disorders in inter-sensory processing profiles when compared with TDC.