Anxiety in Children and Adolescents with Autism Spectrum Disorders

By Susan W. White, Donald P. Oswald, T. Ollendick, L. Scahill. Clinical Psychology Review, 2009

1,440 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Anxiety and poor stress management are common concerns in clinical samples of children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). Anxiety may worsen during adolescence, as young people face an increasingly complex social milieu and often become more aware of their differences and interpersonal difficulties. This review summarizes the state of research on the prevalence, phenomenology, and treatment of anxiety in youth with autism and related conditions such as Asperger’s disorder. Using search words autism, asperger(s), or pervasive developmental disorder and anxiety or anxious to find reports published between 1990 and 2008, this review identified 40 papers. The results of the review suggest that anxiety, whether measured categorically or dimensionally, is indeed common in children and adolescents with autism spectrum disorders and may be a source of additional morbidity. The assessment of anxiety disorders in ASD should be conducted using multiple informants and modalities, as children with ASD often do not display age-typical symptoms of anxiety. To date, relatively few controlled intervention studies using well-characterized samples have been conducted despite preliminary evidence for efficacy of select pharmacological and psychosocial approaches. Recommendations for future applied research are presented and clinical implications are explored.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Genetics, Psychiatry and Mental health

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/cebc2da42f70eff7a93e7076e519f41af8a5b1aa

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Citations in the corpus

Variables Associated with Anxiety and Depression in Children with Autism (2011, background): “Studies show poor agreement between parent, teacher, and self report of anxiety ( White et al. 2009; White and Roberson-Nay 2009), without a consistent pattern between studies.”
Emerging Adulthood as a Critical Stage in the Life Course (2018, background): “Adults with ASD and related conditions are more vulnerable to anxiety and depression which can require specific treatments (Skokauskas and Gallagher 2010; White et al. 2009).”
Emotion Recognition in Children with Autism Spectrum Disorders: Relations to Eye Gaze and Autonomic State (2010, result): “This behavioral and physiological profile have some overlap with clinical features of anxiety and is in line with research showing that children and adolescents with ASD experience a high level of anxious symptomatology (for review see Kuusikko et al. 2008; MacNeil et al. 2009).”