Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder and Abnormalities of Clinical EEG: A Qualitative Review

Abstract

Over the last decade, the comorbidity between Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) and epilepsy has been widely demonstrated, and many hypotheses regarding the common neurobiological bases of these disorders have been put forward. A variable, but significant, prevalence of abnormalities on electroencephalogram (EEG) has been documented in non-epileptic children with ASD; therefore, several scientific studies have recently tried to demonstrate the role of these abnormalities as a possible biomarker of altered neural connectivity in ASD individuals. This narrative review intends to summarize the main findings of the recent scientific literature regarding abnormalities detected with standard EEG in children/adolescents with idiopathic ASD. Research using three different databases (PubMed, Scopus and Google Scholar) was conducted, resulting in the selection of 10 original articles. Despite an important lack of studies on preschoolers and a deep heterogeneity in results, some authors speculated on a possible association between EEG abnormalities and ASD characteristics, in particular, the severity of symptoms. Although this correlation needs to be more strongly elucidated, these findings may encourage future studies aimed at demonstrating the role of electrical brain abnormalities as an early biomarker of neural circuit alterations in ASD, highlighting the potential diagnostic, prognostic and therapeutic value of EEG in this field.

Keywords: Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD); EEG abnormalities; children; neurodevelopmental disorders.

Figure 1

Flowchart of the article selection process.

Figure 2

Relationship between EEG abnormality rates and only the rate of epilepsy as a variable taken independently of the rest [54,55,56,57,58,59,60,61,62,63].

Figure 3

The criteria used to diagnose ASD influence the EEG abnormality rates [54,55,56,57,58,59,60,61,62,63].