Important New Review of Behavioral Therapies
The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality has a new report, Therapies for Children With Autism Spectrum Disorder: Behavioral Interventions Update. An excerpt:
Since our previous review in 2011, there has been a significant increase in the quantity and quality of studies investigating behavioral interventions. These new studies add to the prior report and strengthen our ability to make conclusions about the effectiveness of behavioral interventions. Of the 45 comparative studies of behavioral interventions (29 RCTs [randomized controlled trials]) in the 2011 review, we considered only 2 as good quality. Among the new studies described in this current review, 19 studies are good quality, and 48 of the 65 included studies are RCTs.
Evidence from the original report and this update suggests that early behavioral and developmental intervention based on the principles of ABA delivered in an intensive (>15 hours per week) and comprehensive (i.e., addressing numerous areas of functioning) approach can positively affect a subset of children with ASD (Table B). Across approaches, children receiving early intensive behavioral and developmental interventions demonstrate improvements in cognitive, language, adaptive, and ASD impairments compared with children receiving low-intensity interventions and eclectic non–ABA-based intervention approaches.
Since our previous review, there have also been substantially more studies of well-controlled low-intensity interventions aimed at parent training for comprehensive impact on social communication skills. Although parent training programs modified parenting behaviors during interactions, data are more limited about their ability to improve broad developmental skills (such as cognition, adaptive behavior, and ASD symptom severity) beyond short-term language gains for some children.
A growing number of studies of improved quality demonstrated positive effects of social skills interventions on at least one outcome measure, but a lack of consistency in the interventions studied and outcome measures used makes it difficult to understand specific effects of different intervention modalities.
A growing evidence base also suggests that children receiving targeted play-based interventions (e.g., joint attention, imitation, play-based interventions) demonstrate improvements in early social communication skills. Children receiving targeted joint attention packages in combination with other interventions show substantial improvements in joint attention and language skills over time. There is also evidence across a variety of play-based interventions that young children may display short-term improvements in early play, imitation, joint attention, and interaction skills. However, evidence that these short-term improvements are linked to broader indexes of change over time is not substantial.
CBT [cognitive behavioral therapy] for associated conditions such as anxiety had the largest number of high-quality studies in the current review. A strong evidence base now suggests that school-aged children with average to above average intelligence and comorbid anxiety symptoms receiving manualized CBT therapy show substantial improvements in anxiety compared with wait-list controls. Table B summarizes the strength of the evidence for each category of intervention.
