Reducing Anxiety in Teens with ASD and Intellectual Disabilities
March 01, 2016
By: Organization for Autism Research
Categories: Research, Research Preview
In 2015, OAR’s Board of Directors authorized funding for eight new applied autism research studies in 2016. These new grants, totaling $229,794, bring OAR’s total research funding to over $3.5 million since 2002. This is the third of eight previews that will be featured in The OARacle over the next few months.
Adolescents with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) and intellectual disability (ID) are at risk for developing significant anxiety that adversely impacts participation in home, school, and community. Anxiety may contribute to social isolation, place adolescents at risk for further mental health concerns and problem behavior, and lead to more restricted school and living situations. While many families seek assistance from their teen’s school and community mental health providers, few are prepared to treat anxiety in this complex population.
OAR-funded researcher Audrey Blakeley-Smith, Ph.D., and her co-investigators, Judy Reaven, Ph.D., and Susan Hepburn, Ph.D., all clinical psychologists and associate professors in the Department of Psychiatry, University of Colorado, School of Medicine, are hoping to provide a solution to this dilemma. They have created “Facing Your Fears: Adolescents with Autism and Intellectual Disabilities,” a family-focused, group cognitive behavioral therapy treatment for an adolescent ASD and ID population. The program is a modified version of a program they developed for youth with ASD and average cognitive abilities. The young people who participated in that treatment demonstrated significant reductions in anxiety.
“Facing Your Fears: Adolescents with Autism and Intellectual Disabilities” is innovative in four aspects:
Pre- and post-outcome assessment measures will be administered to participating parents. An anxiety battery will assess the teen’s anxiety symptoms before and after treatment while a functional outcomes battery will assess the teens’ problem behavior, quality of life, and participation in the community before and after treatment. In addition, teens and parents will rate each session.
The results of this study may support further development of the Facing Your Fears intervention package, thus providing social support, psychoeducation, and anxiety treatment to a broader, and potentially more representative group of individuals with ASD.
Reductions in teen anxiety could lead to important functional outcomes for adolescents (such as increased engagement in activities, broader social experiences, better quality of life) and their families (less isolation, improved quality of life). Given that anxiety and problem behavior typically isolate and restrict families, providing an intervention that will help expand a family’s support network through a group treatment intervention is valuable.