Continuous Distribution of Autistic Traits in an Indian Sample

Excerpt

To the Editor: Whether psychiatric syndromes exist as discrete entities or on a continuous dimension in the general population has been frequently debated by researchers. Several researchers from across different cultures have reported on autistic traits being continuously distributed [1]. This has resulted in a shift in nomenclature over the last few decades with Childhood Autism being now referred to as Autism Spectrum Disorders [2]. This is the first large scale study to report on autistic traits among children in mainstream schools in India. Seven hundred seventy one children (ages 5 to 11) from different mainstream schools across Bangalore city were rated on the Social Responsiveness Scale (SRS) [3] by consenting parents. The SRS data showed that autistic traits were continuously distributed in the population (Fig. 1). Accordingly, non-parametric tests were used for further analysis. The range of SRS scores for the entire sample was 1 to 119 with a standard deviation of 19.717. Girls in this sample unusually had a higher mean score. However, when we removed the higher outliers (using the inter-quartile rule) among the scores, we found that the mean scores of the boys were higher than those of the girls.

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