Comparison of Sensory Profile scores of young children with and without autism spectrum disorders.

OBJECTIVES: The purpose of this study was to describe the sensory-based behaviors of young children with autism as reported by their parents on the Sensory Profile. Factor scores of children with autism were compared with those of children without autism. METHOD: The Sensory Profile questionnaire was completed by parents of 40 children with autism 3 through 6 years of age and parents of 40 children without autism 3 through 6 years of age. RESULTS: The performance of children with autism was significantly different from that of children without autism on 8 of 10 factors. Factors where differences were found included Sensory Seeking, Emotionally Reactive, Low Endurance/Tone, Oral Sensitivity, Inattention/Distractibility, Poor Registration, Fine Motor/Perceptual, and Other. CONCLUSION: Findings from the study suggest that young children with autism have deficits in a variety of sensory processing abilities as measured by the Sensory Profile. Further research is needed to replicate these findings, to examine the possibility of subgroups on the basis of sensory processing, and to contrast the sensory processing abilities of children with other disabilities to those of children with autism.     

The Test of Orientation for Rehabilitation Patients: interrater reliability

The Test of Orientation for Rehabilitation Patients (TORP) (Deitz, Beeman, & Thorn, in press) was developed for use with patients with brain injuries in inpatient rehabilitation settings. It was designed to assess orientation to person and personal situation, place, time, schedule, and temporal continuity. Interrater reliability for the TORP was examined with the use of 34 brain-injured and 35 non-brain-injured patients. Two occupational therapists trained in administering the TORP, as specified in the test manual (Dietz et al., in press), served as the examiners. One therapist administered and scored the test while the second therapist observed and scored the test for the same subject. Intraclass correlation coefficients, used as indexes of reliability for the scoring of the total test and subtests, ranged from .89 to 1.00 for the non-brain-injured group and from .94 to .99 for the brain-injured group. These findings suggest that an occupational therapist can reliably score the TORP for patients both with and without brain injuries.     

A ventilator for magnetic resonance imaging

Breathing motion severely degrades the quality of magnetic resonance images (MRI) of the thorax and upper abdomen and interferes with the acquisition of quantitative data. To minimize these motion effects, we built an MRI compatible ventilator for use in animal studies. Solid state circuitry is used for controlling ventilation parameters. The ventilator can be triggered internally at frequencies of 0.1 to 30 Hz or it can be triggered externally such as by the MRI pulse sequence. When triggered by the scanner, ventilation is synchronized to occur between image data acquisitions. Thus, image data are obtained when there is no breathing motion and at a minimum lung volume when hydrogen density is maximum. Since the ventilator can be adjusted to operate at virtually any frequency from conventional to high frequency, ventilation can be synchronized to all commonly used repetition times (100 ms to 2000 ms or more; 600 to 30 breaths/min). Scan synchronous ventilation eliminates breathing motion artifacts from most imaging sequences (single and multiple spin echo and inversion recovery). Best image quality is obtained when scan synchronous ventilation is combined with cardiac gating. These methods are also useful for quantitative research studies of thoracic and abdominal organs.