IAN RESEARCH PRELIMINARY RESULTS: Attention and Mood issues by ASD diagnosis

Why Is This Important?

Many of the children taking part in IAN Research have also been diagnosed with or treated for other conditions, including Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) or Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD), Anxiety, Depression, or Bipolar Disorder (which used to be known as "manic-depression.")  Scientists want to understand how such additional diagnoses vary according to type of Autism Spectrum Disorder.

This bar graph shows the percentage of children in IAN Research with a diagnosis of Autism, PDD-NOS, or Asperger's Syndrome who have also been diagnosed with or treated for a variety of disorders of attention and mood.  We are finding that a significant number of children "on the spectrum" have received such diagnoses or received such treatments. 

Some important questions as we go forward will be: To what extent did children receive these other diagnoses on the way to their current diagnosis?  (In other words, was an inaccurate diagnosis then replaced by a  more accurate one?)  To what extent do children actually have more than one full blown diagnosis --or issues so severe in terms of lack of focus, hyperactivity, or mood problems that they are treated for such?  What explains the difference in how often such conditions are diagnosed or treated across the autism spectrum, with children with Asperger's appearing to be most at risk?

We also took a look at this data for only children age 10 and over.  Considering only older children may yield an even more accurate picture.  For one thing, younger children are less likely to have reached the point where a mood disorder would be diagnosed, so including them can "wash down" the percentages.  For another, it may be that most children will have received their final, most accurate ASD diagnosis by the age of ten.  When we recalculate, looking only at children age 10 and over this time, we obtain an even more striking result, as shown below.