Comparison of Obsessive–Compulsive Disorder in Parents of Children with Autism and Parents of Non-Autistic Children

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a term referred to sever psychological problems in children, which appear before 36 months. Autism spectrum disorder is developmental disability that can cause significant social, communication and behavioral challenges. There is often nothing about how people with ASD look that sets them apart from other people. People with ASD may communicate, interact, behave, and learn in ways that are different from most other people. Learning, thinking, and problem-solving abilities of people with ASD can range from gifted to challenge. Some people with ASD need to help in their daily lives more than need in normal people. These impairments affect the development in a bad way and lead to deficiency of children. Most of the people with an obsessive-compulsive disorder have the common symptoms with autistic children like repetitive actions, tidiness and tending to order and arrangement. Considering the high prevalence of anxiety disorder, especially obsessive-compulsive disorder in autistic children the objective of this study was to investigate the symptoms of obsessive-compulsive disorder in parents of autistic children to find whether if these traits passed from parent to their children. The research design was descriptive and correlational. Population of this study consisted of parents who had autistic and normal children. In this study, 50 parents with autistic children were selected by a convenience sampling method and 50 parents of normal children were selected by using multistage cluster sampling. A child psychiatrist certified diagnosis of autism in all children and all of the autistic children were the member of the community of autistic children. Maudsley questionnaire, which has 30 items, was used to find obsessive-compulsive parents. This questionnaire consists of four scales: checking, tidiness, slowness and uncertainty. Each scale concludes ten items. This test gave to the parents and they took to the examiner after filing. The result of independent samples t-test showed that parents of autistic children (9.46) had high score than parents of normal children (4.53). The significant difference referred to washing scale. In addition, the result of t–test for two independent groups indicated that there is a significant difference at level (p<0.001) between the total mean of two groups. In addition, the result of F test showed that there was a significant difference in predictive variable (obsession) in parents of autistic and normal children (p<0.001). According the special value (0.64) it could be said that high variance of the dependent variable of two groups was explained by discriminant function. In addition, Wilks Lambda showed the function at the level (p<0.001) was significant. High intensity obsession of obsessive-compulsive disorder in autistic children may indicate that parental obsessive-compulsive disorder was a predictive variable for autism symptoms in their children. In addition, these results showed that autism spectrum disorders had comorbidity with obsessive-compulsive disorder.