Am J Psychiatry 1990; 147:1609-1613
Copyright © 1990 by American Psychiatric Association
Brainstem auditory evoked response and subcortical abnormalities in autism
J Thivierge, C Bedard, R Cote and M Maziade
Department of Psychiatry, Laval University, Quebec, Canada.
Previous studies of the neurobiology of autism that have used the brainstem
auditory evoked response have given contradictory results. The authors of
this study considered two supplementary aspects; they added an ipsilateral
masking procedure, and they compared the results for every subject to the
values (corrected for age and sex) of a large number of normal children.
Twenty autistic (according to DSM-III-R criteria) and 13 mentally retarded
(nonverbal IQ less than 75) subjects were assessed. Eighty percent of the
autistic subjects had abnormal interpeak latencies, compared to 15% of the
mentally retarded subjects. The I-V and III-V prolonged interpeak latency
values were seen only in the autistic subjects. The ipsilateral masking
procedure doubled the rate of detection of higher-brainstem abnormalities
in the autistic children.
