Anxiety, concerns and COVID-19: Cross-country perspectives from families and individuals with neurodevelopmental conditions.

Background: The COVID-19 pandemic had a major impact on the mental health and well-being of children with neurodevelopmental conditions (NDCs) and of their families worldwide. However, there is insufficient evidence to understand how different factors (e.g., individual, family, country, children) have impacted on anxiety levels of families and their children with NDCs developed over time. Methods: We used data from a global survey assessing the experience of 8043 families and their children with NDCs (mean of age (m) = 13.18 years, 37% female) and their typically developing siblings (m = 12.9 years, 45% female) in combination with data from the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control, the University of Oxford, and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) World Factbook, to create a multilevel data set. Using stepwise multilevel modelling, we generated child-, family- and country-related factors that may have contributed to the anxiety levels of children with NDCs, their siblings if they had any, and their parents. All data were reported by parents. Results: Our results suggest that parental anxiety was best explained by family-related factors such as concerns about COVID-19 and illness. Children's anxiety was best explained by child-related factors such as children's concerns about loss of routine, family conflict, and safety in general, as well as concerns about COVID-19. In addition, anxiety levels were linked to the presence of pre-existing anxiety conditions for both children with NDCs and their parents. Conclusions: The present study shows that across the globe there was a raise in anxiety levels for both parents and their children with NDCs because of COVID-19 and that country-level factors had little or no impact on explaining differences in this increase, once family and child factors were considered. Our findings also highlight that certain groups of children with NDCs were at higher risk for anxiety than others and had specific concerns. Together, these results show that anxiety of families and their children with NDCs during the COVID-19 pandemic were predicted by very specific concerns and worries which inform the development of future toolkits and policy. Future studies should investigate how country factors can play a protective role during future crises.

Investigating neural dynamics in autism spectrum conditions outside of the laboratory using mobile electroencephalography.

There is currently a paucity of neuroscientific data recorded from more severely affected individuals with autism spectrum conditions (ASC). Enabling data collection to take place in a more familiar environment, that is, at home, may increase access to research participation in this group. Here, we present a new accessible method of studying brain activity of autistic individuals outside the laboratory in their home environment, using mobile electroencephalography (EEG) technology. The primary aim of the present study was to test the feasibility of acquiring good quality EEG data from autistic children at home, assessed via a set of objective data quality metrics, and to develop a list of practical guidelines on how to successfully conduct an EEG experiment in such a naturalistic setting based directly upon participants' views. To demonstrate the utility of this method, we evaluated the EEG signal quality recorded from 69 children with ASC at home using a gel-based Eego Sports mobile EEG system. Five key indicators of data quality were assessed. Our results demonstrate that it is possible to record high quality EEG signal from children with ASC at home, generating data that could address a number of research questions. A user experience survey identified areas of good practice, which researchers should take into consideration when designing mobile EEG studies aiming to acquire data from children with ASC at a home environment.

Atypical EEG in autism spectrum disorder: Comparing a dimensional and a categorical approach.

Myriad studies have found group differences in neural dynamics between people with and without autism spectrum disorder (ASD). However, the extent to which variation in neural dynamics is related to variation in the autism phenotype across the population is not known. Here we measured behavioral characteristics of autism alongside intertrial phase coherence (ITC) and multiscale entropy (MSE) computed from EEG in order to address this question. Data were obtained from 99 adults, 38 of whom had an ASD diagnosis. Phenotypic information was obtained from the Social Responsiveness Scale (Revised), the Repetitive Behavior Questionnaire, the WHO Adult ADHD Self-Report Scale Screener, and the Beck Anxiety Inventory (Trait version). ITC and MSE were computed from EEG recorded during visual stimulation and eyes-closed rest. We found no evidence to suggest that population variance in autistic traits is underpinned by variance in neural dynamics, despite finding that ITC and MSE are more likely to be reduced in people with ASD than in those without. We conclude that there are likely to be multiple neural profiles underpinning ASD, and suggest that while individual differences in the autism phenotype exist across the population, their distribution is not underpinned by individual differences in neural dynamics. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).