Intellectual Functioning and Autism Spectrum Disorder: Can Profiles Inform Identification of Subpopulations?

Children and adolescents with neurodevelopmental disorders show cognitive heterogeneity and require a person-centered approach

We aimed to identify patterns of cognitive differences and characterize subgroups of Mexican children and adolescents with three neurodevelopmental disorders (NDD): intellectual disability (ID), autism spectrum disorders (ASD) and attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). The sample included 74 children and adolescents 6–15 years; 34% had ID, ASD or ADHD, 47% had ID in comorbidity with ASD, ADHD or both, 11% had ASD + ADHD, 8% were children without NDD. We applied WISC-IV, Autism Diagnostic Interview-Revised, Mini-International Neuropsychiatric Structured Interview, Child Behavior Checklist, and UNICEF Child Functioning Module. We evaluated the normality of the WISC-IV sub-scales using the Shapiro-Francia test, then conducted a latent class analysis and assessed inter-class differences in terms of household, parent and child characteristics. The following four-class solution best fit the data: “Lower Cognitive Profile” (LCP), “Lower Working Memory” (LWM), “Higher Working Memory” (HWM), “Higher Cognitive Profile” (HCP). LCP included most of the children with ID, who had a low Working Memory (WM) index score. LWM included mainly children with ASD or ID + ADHD; their Perceptual Reasoning (PR) and Processing Speed (PS) index scores were much higher than those for Verbal Comprehension (VC) and WM. HWM included children with ASD or ADHD; their scores for PR, PS and VC were high with lower WM (although higher than for LWM). HCP included children without NDD and with ASD or ADHD or both and had the highest scores on all indices. Children with NDD show cognitive heterogeneity and thus require individualized treatment plans.