Gross Motor Development, Movement Abnormalities, and Early Identification of Autism

Abstract

Gross motor development (supine, prone, rolling, sitting, crawling, walking) and movement abnormalities were examined in the home videos of infants later diagnosed with autism (regression and no regression subgroups), developmental delays (DD), or typical development. Group differences in maturity were found for walking, prone, and supine, with the DD and © Springer Scicnce+Business Media, LLC 2007 Correspondence to: Sally Ozonoff, sjo7.onoff@ucdavis.edu. HHS Public Access Author Manuscript Author ManuscriptAuthor Manuscript Author ManuscriptAutism-No Regression groups both showing later developing motor maturity than typical children. The only statistically significant differences in movement abnormalities were in the DD group; the two autism groups did not differ from the typical group in rates of movement abnormalities or lack of protective responses. These findings do not replicate previous investigations suggesting that early motor abnormalities seen on home video can assist in early identification of autism.

What can autism teach us about the role of sensorimotor systems in higher cognition? New clues from studies on language, action semantics, and abstract emotional concept processing

“…Several studies have reported on motor milestones, either through home-video analysis (Baranek, 1999;Gernsbacher, Sauer, Geye, Schweigert, & Hill Goldsmith, 2008;Ozonoff et al, 2008;Teitelbaum, Teitelbaum, Nye, Fryman, & Maurer, 1998) and/or interviewing parents (Gernsbacher et al, 2008;Kopp et al, 2010;Lloyd, MacDonald, & Lord, 2013;Ozonoff et al, 2008;Sumner et al, 2016). These studies are methodologically problematic in the respect that video rating is open to human error (though most studies blind raters to diagnosis), videos cover a small and selective snapshot of early life, and retrospective reports are open to inaccuracy.…”

“…Nor did Lloyd et al's (2013) analysis of the few items concerning motor milestones in the ADI-R (Le Couteur, Lord, & Rutter, 2003). Gernbacher et al's (2008) parental reports suggest a delay in crawling and in numerous oral-motor milestones such as blowing kisses; Ozonoff et al's (2008) parental reports reflect significant delays in walking and trends towards delays in crawling and sitting. This study differentiated between autistic children with and without early regression.…”

“…Language problems are of course often related to IQ and so naturally, autistic individuals with better current and/or historic language skills tend to perform superiorly in most motor tasks (Barbeau et al, 2015;Belmonte et al, 2013;Gernsbacher et al, 2008;Hsu et al, 2004;McPhillips et al, 2014): as we shall go on to discuss, language requires motor proficiency and so this is hardly surprising. Finally, a single study previously mentioned investigated motor differences between autistic children with and without developmental regression, finding different patterns of motor impairment which may reflect different pathological processes (Ozonoff et al, 2008). This study only concerned infants, and so the later differences between these groups would be of interest.…”

Characterizing autistic disorder based on Principle Component Analysis

“…Autism was first noticed by Kanner in 1943, as cited in [2,3,5,6] and reported that they have poor motor and imitation tasks and this has been established by many researches [2,3,4]. Several researches have been done to explain the symptoms of autism.…”

“…However; it is difficult to detect autism in infants based on psychology test in motor movement [5,6], while researchers revealed that autistic individual between the ages of 9 to 10 have deficits in motor task [7]. Even though it may be possible to detect poor motor movement for autism, it is not usually adopted in most cases to diagnose autism; most clinics depend on social defects rather than other behavior which are not shown in the early age.…”