Correlation between Sensory Processing Status and the Participation of Normal and Autistic (Normal Intelligence) School Children in Daily Living Activities

Up to 45 to 96 percent of children with autism suffer from sensory processing disorder. Considering the high prevalence of sensory processing disorder and reduced participation in activities of daily living in children with autism, the present study was conducted with the purpose of studying the relationship between sensory information processing and participation of autistic children of normal intelligence.

A cross-sectional study was conducted on 10 primary school autistic children with normal intelligence and 10 normal peers. In order to collect data from parents, two standard questionnaires of life habit and Dunn sensory profile assessment were used. Data analysis was performed using SPSS21 software and spearman correlation test was run at a significance level below 0.05.

The results showed that the average participation in daily activities in autistic children and normal children were 4.08 and 8.16, respectively. Average sensory processing in children with autism was 131.30 (obvious impairment of sensory processing) and in normal children 145.1 (possible impairment in processing of sensory information). Based on the data, no significant relationship was found between the sensory information processing and participation in high-functioning children with autism (P-value=0.06). In addition, there were no significant relationship between sensory information processing and participation in normal children (P-value= 0.85).

The findings emphasized that children with high-functioning autism have sensory processing disorder, and their participation in the activities of daily living has decreased. There was no significant relationship between the sensory information processing and participation in children with autism and their normal peers. This could be due to the attendance of high-functioning children with autism in our study.