A multimodal approach can identify specific motor profiles in autism and attention‐deficit/hyperactivity disorder

Abstract

It is still unclear whether and to what extent the motor difficulties are specific to autism. This study aimed to determine whether a multimodal assessment of motor skills could accurately discriminate autistic children from attention‐deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and typically developing (TD) peers. Seventy‐five children, aged 7–13, equally divided into three groups, were assessed with the developmental coordination disorder questionnaire (DCDQ), the movement assessment battery for children 2 (MABC2), the sensorimotor subtests of NEPSY‐II, and the kinematic analysis of a reach‐to‐drop task. Principal component analysis (PCA) on DCDQ subscales revealed one factor—Caregiver Report—, whereas MABC2/NEPSY‐II scores identified three factors—namely, Object Interception and Balance, Motor Imitation, and Fine‐Motor Skills—. Lastly, PCA on kinematic variables identified four factors: PC1, loaded by the parameters of velocity and acceleration throughout the task, PC2 and PC3 involved the temporal parameters of the two submovements, and PC4 accounted for the wrist inclination at ball drop. When comparing autistic and TD children, Caregiver Report and Motor Imitation factors predicted membership with 87.2% of accuracy. In the model comparing ADHD and TD groups, Caregiver Report and Fine‐Motor Skills predicted membership with an accuracy of 73.5%. In the last model, the Object Interception and Balance factor differentiated autistic children from ADHD with an accuracy of 73.5%. In line with our previous findings, kinematics did not differentiate school‐aged autistic children from ADHD and TD peers. The present findings show that specific motor profiles in autism and ADHD can be isolated with a multimodal investigation of motor skills.

Decreased central corpus callosum volume is associated with repetitive behaviours and motor difficulties in autistic children

“…Indeed, across participants, the volume of the central CC was associated with motor abilities as assessed by the DCDQ questionnaire, specifically in the domain of motor control. Interestingly, this domain includes items referred to ball skills (such as throwing, catching or hitting a ball), which are among the most documented motor features in autism (De Francesco et al, 2023; Lidstone & Mostofsky, 2021; Whyatt & Craig, 2012). The correlation in our data seems therefore to suggest that an increase of volume of the white-matter tracts likely connecting motor-relevant structures corresponds to better motor performance as judged by parents.…”

Towards Experimental Approaches to Advance Discovery of Clinically Meaningful Sensory-Motor Biomarkers

“…In what follows, we will present both CMC/Bayesian Inference frameworks in the context of a ball catching task. We choose this task as an exemplar in part because there is strong evidence for differences in the execution of dynamic visual-motor integration (VMI) tasks such as ball catching/interception (Ament et al, 2015;De Francesco et al, 2023;Landa et al, 2016;Whyatt & Craig, 2013), but also other related tasks (Lidstone et al, 2020). Notably, this also includes strong evidence for autism-associated difficulty with motor imitation, which is crucial to socialcommunicative development (Kilroy et al, 2022;MacNeil & Mostofsky, 2012;Tunçgenç et al, 2020).…”