Half of children with autism are prone to wandering, sometimes for hours, a dangerous behavior pattern that can start before kindergarten, a national survey has quantified for the first time.
The extent of the wandering phenomenon was revealed in a survey of 856 parents whose children have been diagnosed with an autism spectrum disorder.
Half of the respondents reported their children not only have wandered from home but were gone long enough to raise alarm.
Conducted by the Interactive Autism Network, an online autism research project overseen by the Kennedy Krieger Institute in Baltimore, Md., the survey is the first to attempt to quantify the problem. The institute is affiliated with Johns Hopkins University.
Two out of three parents reported their children had a “close call” with a traffic-related incident. One-third said a child nearly drowned. Fifty-eight percent reported wandering as the most stressful of all autism-related behaviors.
On April 19, the body of Blake Murrell, a 4-year-old with autism who had wandered from his home in Cushing, Okla., was found in a pond.
In 2010, 10 children with autism died after wandering off, according to the Krieger institute.
ShareThis
No comments:
Post a Comment