Interventions for anxiety in mainstream school‐aged children with autism spectrum disorder: A systematic review

Authors

Kylie Hillman, Australian Council for Educational ResearchFollow
Katherine Dix, Australian Council for Educational ResearchFollow
Syeda Kashfee Ahmed, Australian Council for Educational ResearchFollow
Petra Lietz, Australian Council for Educational ResearchFollow
Jenny Trevitt, Australian Council for Educational ResearchFollow
Elizabeth O'Grady, Australian Council for Educational ResearchFollow
Mirko Uljarević, Stanford University
Giacomo Vivanti, Drexel University
Darren Hedley, La Trobe University

Publication Date

5-2020

Subjects

Anxiety, Interventions, Autism spectrum disorders, Cognitive behaviour therapy, Systematic review, Randomised controlled trials, Experiments, Primary school students, Secondary school students

Comments

This article is also available at the journal's website.

Abstract

Anxiety is a common problem in school‐aged children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) and other psychosocial interventions have been developed as alternatives to pharmacological intervention to treat anxiety symptoms in students with ASD without co‐occurring intellectual disability. This present synthesis of evidence is a systematic review and meta‐analysis examining the efficacy of interventions for reducing anxiety among school‐aged children with ASD. The review summarizes evidence from 24 studies using an experimental or quasi‐experimental design. The authors’ conclude that there is evidence that CBT is an effective behavioral treatment for anxiety in some children and youth with ASD without co‐occurring intellectual disability. Evidence for other psychoeducational interventions is more limited, not just due to the popularity of CBT but also due to the quality of the smaller number of non‐CBT studies available.

Recommended Citation

Hillman, K., Dix, K., Ahmed, S., Lietz, P., Trevitt, J., O'Grady, E., Uljarević, M., Vivanti, G., & Hedley, D. (2020). Interventions for anxiety in mainstream school‐aged children with autism spectrum disorder: A systematic review. https://research.acer.edu.au/learning_processes/27

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Copyright Statement

© 2020 The Authors. Campbell Systematic Reviews published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of The Campbell Collaboration

This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

ISSN

1891-1803