Prevalence of Self-Injurious Behaviors

Intro: Welcome back to another episode on “What the AUTISM?!” This podcast is for anyone who is struggling with understanding what autism is and how we can better empower our autism community through research proven methods. In each episode, I will be sharing with you ground-breaking research and how the diagnosis of autism can often be misunderstood. If you are a new listener to our podcast, I highly recommend you start from episode 1 to catch you up to speed on various terminology and concepts! Now let’s get started…

Research Article: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5392775/

In the research study we’ll be reviewing today, we’ll be talking about self injurious behaviors and exactly how prevalent this behavior is within children with autism. In 2017, a handful of researchers conducted a population-based study that reviewed a large sample of children with autism to gauge exactly how prevalent Self-injurious behaviors are within the autism population.

Self-injurious behaviors (SIB) are quite diverse in its appearance. Common types of SIB in ASD include-head banging, hair pulling, arm biting, eye poking, and skin scratching. Often times these types of behaviors are established because of a child’s inability to communicate their thoughts and emotions. They have learned that when they engage in self injurious behaviors, they get an immediate response from their caretakers, which eventually leads them to what they want, whether that may be attention, release of built up frustration, and/or access to a particular food/object/person. Regardless of the function of the behavior, self injurious behaviors create a huge health and safety concern for families, schools, and within community members. As always, I’ll be including the research article on our Facebook page for you to follow along. The research article shows a table that breaks down the findings from this study to help you better understand the results of what these researchers found.

Analyzing the findings of this research study, they found that the prevalence of SIB in a population-based study of ASD averaged 27.7 % over three surveillance years. Due to various limitations and sampling differences in this study, there are speculations that this 27.7% may be an under estimation of the prevalence rate of self injurious behaviors amongst children with ASD. However, regardless, these results suggest that self injurious behaviors within ASD are common and deserve more clinical and research attention in order to further advance the level of awareness and treatment strategies.

This study revealed that SIB are a common phenotypic characteristic among children with ASD and that its prevalence is higher than has been reported in children with other developmental disabilities. SIB are dangerous behaviors but it’s also important to note the amount of impact that it carries within the immediate family and community circles. SIB deserve more clinical and research attention but of course, this requires time, effort, and financial means. In conclusion, SIB in ASD is an important public health concern that affects many children. Future research is warranted to better understand its potential risk factors and consequences, in order to develop effective and more targeted treatment strategies.

Does your child exhibit SIB or SIB-like behaviors? Does your child struggle in communicating their thoughts, feelings, wants and needs? This may some times result in them hitting their head or banging their head against the wall. Some parents I have worked with in the past have also reported that their child at 18 months used to cry and repeatedly bang their head against the pillow or against their parents’ stomachs. Now, although this doesn’t warrant huge safety/health risks as the pillows and stomachs have cushion, but how...