Assignment 18: Annotated Bibliography 2

McCue, Lena M., et al. "Prevalence of Non-Febrile Seizures in Children with Idiopathic Autism Spectrum Disorder and Their Unaffected Siblings: A Retrospective Cohort Study." BMC Neurology, vol. 16, 28 Nov. 2016, pp. 1-9. EBSCOhost, doi:10.1186/s12883-016-0764-3.

Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is a disorder commonly characterized by lowered levels of social interactions and communication. Those diagnosed with ASD "commonly experience a high number of co-occuring disorders" (McCue 1). It is known that seizures often accompany ASD. It is also known that when seizures are present in those diagnosed with ASD, there tends to be a lower cognitive level and a higher mortality rate. In this experiment, the rate of non-febrile (not caused by a fever) seizures were measured in children aged 2-18 diagnosed with ASD. These numbers were then compared with the numbers from their siblings who were not diagnosed with ASD. It was determined that children with ASD had 5.27 times higher odds of having non-febrile seizures compared to their unaffected siblings.

“Children with idiopathic ASD are significantly more likely to have non-febrile seizures than their unaffected siblings, suggesting that non-febrile seizures may be ASD-specific.” (pg. 1)

“Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a neurodevelopmental disorder characterized not only by the deficits in communication and social interaction but also by the high prevalence of co-occurring medical conditions such as seizures and epilepsy, metabolic abnormalities, gastrointestinal dysfunctions, and sleep disorders” (pg. 2)

“These findings suggest that the reported non-febrile seizures may be ASD-specific and cannot be explained by genetic predisposition alone” (pg. 7)

Each of the five contributing authors are known to be college professors who frequently conduct research. In addition this article was published in BMC Neurology, a peer reviewed journal. This article is also published in Galileo, a known credible source.

I will use the information in this article to build my basic understanding of seizures. In addition to discussing how seizures were linked between children in the same family, it also gave a highly in depth overview of seizures and ASD, which will be extremely helpful in my capstone project.