Investigation of Adult Behavior Checklist and Adult Self Report Problem Scores within a Sample of Parents with and without Children with Autism

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) or autism is a neurodevelopmental disorder that has a growing prevalence in the United States and globally. Autism is a particularly challenging developmental disorder to manage and has a high economic burden at the familial and institutional levels. While little is known regarding the etiology of autism, research has shown that ASD is highly heritable and that early diagnosis leads to improvements in health outcomes. It is important therefore to identify factors that may predict risk in infants and children, with neuropsychiatric traits in parents being one potentially heritable factor of interest. Analyzing parental neuropsychiatric traits in children with ASD could further inform diagnostic and screening strategies ultimately resulting in marked improvements amongst families with ASD children. We performed a cross-sectional study that utilized data from 286 children and their parents enrolled in the Infant Brain Imaging Study (IBIS). Adult Behavior Checklist (ABCL) and Adult Self Report (ASR) questionnaire forms filled out by parent participants were collected. Once the data was cleaned, we conducted an ANOVA test between groups of HL-ASD, HL-nonASD, and LL-nonASD, as well as an associated Tukey step-down test. HL-ASD refers to infants with an autism diagnosis themselves who also have a sibling with autism, while infants without a positive diagnosis who have siblings that are positive for autism are HL-NonASD, and finally, LL-NonASD refers to infants without autism who do not have a sibling with an ASD diagnosis. Significant differences between groups were found for maternal and paternal depression, anxiety, avoidant, antisocial, and other problem scores. Maternal attention problem scores also had significant differences between groups. We found that the HL-ASD group had higher scores compared to HL-nonASD which in turn had higher scores compared to the LL-nonASD group. Amongst these problem scores, only maternal anxiety scores had significant differences across all three groups HL-ASD greater than HL-nonASD (p=.004), HL-ASD greater than LL-nonASD (p<.001), and HL-nonASD greater than LL-nonASD (p=.014). Many problem scores are derived from items that may reflect the broader autism phenotype which requires further investigation. The elevated rates of problem scores among parents with one or more children with ASD suggest an underlying genetic component of autism. Current autism interventions are largely parent-mediated. Given that parental depression and attention problem scores are elevated amongst families with ASD, this presents a potential barrier to care, which should be addressed with more holistic support to provide the best outcomes possible for such families.