Assessment of postural control system in autistic patients

Introduction Studies using clinical tests have reported abnormal postural balance in children with autism generally but it was only clinically significant when somatosensory input was disrupted alone or in combination with other sensory challenges. Objective To assess the postural control system in autistic children and correlate their age and Child Autism Rating Scale (CARS) score with their postural control. Methods Computerized dynamic posturography was performed in 20 autistic children with (IQ>70) between the ages of 5 and 15 years and 15 age-matched healthy children. Results There was a statistically significant positive correlation between age in both the study and the control groups and the Sensory Organization Test (SOT) results in all SOT conditions. As regards the degree of autism, this study included 20 autistic children diagnosed by CARS and their CARS values ranged from 30 to 46, with a mean (33.7±3.22). In our study, we found that there was a statistically significant negative correlation between the CARS score in the study group and SOT results in all conditions, except in SOT condition 1. Conclusion The evidence from this study suggests the more general involvement of neural circuitry beyond the neural systems for social behavior, communication, and reasoning, all of which share a high demand on neural integration of information.