Children with ASD have a diminished perception of their body movement and postural orientation; as a result, they often sit, stand, and walk with postural impairment.
What Is Posturing in Autism? Posturing is the act of holding one's fingers or hands out at an angle. It is merely one example of stimming or self-stimulatory behavior. It's also defined as arching the back while sitting.
Research has shown that individuals with autism may have differences in their prenatal brain development, including abnormalities in structures involved in facial recognition and processing. These differences could potentially lead to atypical facial features.
Girls with autism tend to have smaller heads and bodies than their typically developing peers, whereas boys with the disorder tend to have average-sized heads and slightly larger bodies, report two studies published in July.
Individuals with autism often have a number of unusual physical characteristics, called dysmorphologies, such as wide-set eyes or broad foreheads. Dysmorphic features may mark a subgroup of individuals who have autism with a distinct underlying genetic cause.
Children with autism have a broader or wider mouth and philtrum - the groove below the nose, above the top lip.
In previous studies, children with autism have been found to have unusually wide faces and wide-set eyes. The cheeks and the nose are also shorter on their faces (Aldridge et al., 2011).
Children with ASD have a diminished perception of their body movement and postural orientation; as a result, they often sit, stand, and walk with postural impairment.
Low muscle tone is commonly seen in children with autism. However, since ASD is a spectrum, their physical presentation can vary drastically from having increased tone which is causing the tip-toe walking, to decreased tone and walking either with flattened feet or compensating by going up onto their tiptoes to walk.
This is particularly important as we knew from previous studies that people with autism tend to have poorer muscular strength and endurance than is typical for their age.
Facial expressions smooth social interactions: A smile may show interest, a frown empathy. People with autism have difficulty making appropriate facial expressions at the right times, according to an analysis of 39 studies1. Instead, they may remain expressionless or produce looks that are difficult to interpret.
Myth 1 – autistic people cannot make eye contact
This is well known but factually inaccurate. Whilst many autistic people struggle to make eye contact, some are able to, so don't assume someone who identifies as being autistic won't be able to meet your gaze.
For individuals with autism spectrum disorders, their dynamic system is working, but it is working differently due to their central nervous system disorder. They may shift, change, and accommodate to their environmental needs, but may do it slower, faster, in unique ways, or only with outside support or accommodations.
At times autistic individuals may stim to meet a specific goal, like balancing sensory input, for example finger flicking or flapping hands to compensate for poor spatio-visual skill. This may be the reason stimming is sometimes defined as automatically reinforced behavior rather than a self-stimulatory behavior.
Stimming behaviour is almost always present in people on the autism spectrum but does not, on its own, necessarily indicate the diagnosis. The biggest difference between autistic and non-autistic stimming is the type of stim and the quantity of stimming.
Many kids on the autism spectrum have a great deal of flexibility. But others may develop rigid routines extremely quickly. If you're working with a child who is more rigid, it's important to make changes early and often.
Although fatigue and burnout can happen to anyone, autistic people are more likely to be affected by this. It is often the result of doing more than you can cope with for too long and can be an immediate response to something, or be caused by a build up of things over time.
Emerging evidence suggests that vestibular brainstem reflexes are altered in a subset of children with ADHD and points to this as a cause of decreased postural control.
This paper first reviews research which shows that autism impacts many systems in the body, including the metabolic, mitochondrial, immunological, gastrointestinal and the neurological. These systems interact in complex and highly interdependent ways.
Autism and Scoliosis
With scoliosis, autism is not exactly a cause, but research shows that people with ASD are more likely to have this curvature of the spine. Other common orthopedic conditions among those living with autism include: Toe walking. Reduced bone density.
Some of the frequent facial features of autism are a broader upper face, shorter middle face, wider eyes, bigger mouth, and the philtrum [19]. The use of facial features as a physical marker to detect autism is one of the most exciting topics in autism research.
As a group, children with ASDs appear to be taller than their unaffected siblings. Children with Asperger's Syndrome and Autism, specifically, appear taller than those with PDD-NOS who, in turn, do not differ from unaffected siblings in height. (See Figure 1.)
People with autism spectrum disorder have difficulty interpreting facial expressions. Using a neural network model that reproduces the brain on a computer, a group of researchers based at Tohoku University have unraveled how this comes to be.