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Does the maturation of early sleep patterns predict language development in autistic children ?

par Rapp, Clara ;Deliens, Gaétane
Référence UNI General Meeting (2023-05-26)
Publication Publié, 2023-05-26

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Résumé :

Introduction: Around 50% of autistic children exhibit a significant language delay, and 30% never develop functional language at all (Tager-Flusberg el al., 2005). In spite of the central place of language in outcome prognostics, the diversity of verbal profiles in Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is still ill-understood. Sleep has been shown to plays an active role in language learning by promoting, inter alia, lexical consolidation and integration (Rasch, 2017). There is also growing evidence that maturation of sleep‐wake rhythms and sleep duration in early childhood is a highly predictive factor of later language outcomes. Longitudinal studies show that short nighttime sleep and poor consolidation of sleep-wake rhythms during the first two years of life is correlated with lower expressive vocabulary (Bernier et al. 2010) and communication skills (Smithson et al. 2018). Furthermore, more nighttime sleep relative to daytime sleep between 6 and 36 months of age is predictive of better receptive vocabulary at school entry, thereby underscoring the long term predictive value of the maturation of early sleep patterns (Dionne et al., 2011; Knowland et al., 2021). These findings are promising to understand the different language trajectories observed in ASD as sleep disturbances, including shorter sleep time and irregular sleep–wake rhythms, are atypically frequent (up to 81.5%) and likely to persist across time in ASD (for a review see Deliens et al., 2015). Already present before the age of two (Dewrang and Sandberg, 2010), sleep disturbances were one of the warning signs that brought concern on children development in 64.7 % of the parents of autistic children (Swinkels et al., 2006). Furthermore, the extent of heterogeneity in sleep patterns in autism is comparable to that of linguistic profiles. In this project we aim to test whether early sleep phenotyping in ASD will predict distinct profiles of language development. Methods:300 autistic children aged between 2 and 7 years will be recruited, 120 on the French‐speaking side and 180 on the Flemish‐speaking side. Expressive and receptive language will be assessed using the EVALO (Coquet , Ferrand , Roustit, 2008), the Peabody pictures (Dunn & Dunn, 1965) and IQ by using the SON-R (Tellegen, Laros & Kiat, 2009) at the beginning of the study and 24 months later. Objective measures of infant sleep will also be collected at these two time points using an actigraph [wGT3X-BT, ActiGraph, Pensacola, USA], a wrist-watch-like device that records body movements. Activity counts will be collected continuously for two weeks and translated into states of sleep or wake through the use of an algorithm specifically developed to study sleep-wake rhythms in infants. Parents will also be asked to complete the Children’s Sleep Habits Questionnaire (Owens et al., 2000) and a generic sleep questionnaire to address sleep history and sleep hygiene and to fill in sleep diaries for their child. Expected results: Grounded on Knowland et al. findings (2021) in TD children, we hypothesized that the rate at which sleep matures over time (measured by the ratio of day-time:night-time sleep) would predict vocabulary growth in ASD children.