Department of Clinical and Experimental Medicine, University of Pisa, Pisa, Italy.
IRCCS Stella Maris Foundation, Pisa, Italy.
J Autism Dev Disord. 2017 Oct;47(10):3243-3251. doi: 10.1007/s10803-017-3250-x.
Sensory issues are of great interest in ASD diagnosis. However, their investigation is mainly based on external observation (parent reports), with methodological limitations. Unobtrusive olfactory assessment allows studying autism neurosensoriality. Here, 20 male children with high-functioning ASD and 20 matched controls were administered a complete olfactory test battery, assessing olfactory threshold, identification and discrimination. ASD children show lower sensitivity (p = 0.041), lower identification (p = 0.014), and intact odor discrimination (p = 0.199) than controls. Comparing olfactory and clinical scores, a significant correlation was found in ASD between olfactory threshold and the CBCL social problems (p = 0.011) and aggressive behavior (p = 0.012) sub-scales. The pattern featuring peripheral hyposensitivity, high-order difficulties in odor identification and regular subcortical odor discrimination is discussed in light of hypo-priors hypothesis for autism.
感觉问题在 ASD 诊断中非常重要。然而，它们的研究主要基于外部观察（父母报告），存在方法学上的局限性。非侵入性嗅觉评估可以研究自闭症的神经感觉。在这里，20 名高功能 ASD 男性儿童和 20 名匹配的对照组接受了完整的嗅觉测试组合，评估嗅觉阈值、识别和辨别能力。与对照组相比，ASD 儿童的敏感性较低（p=0.041），识别能力较低（p=0.014），而气味辨别能力正常（p=0.199）。比较嗅觉和临床评分，在 ASD 中发现嗅觉阈值与 CBCL 社会问题（p=0.011）和攻击行为（p=0.012）分量表之间存在显著相关性。在自闭症的低优先级假设的基础上，讨论了外周低敏、高级嗅觉识别困难和规则的皮质下嗅觉辨别模式。
