At a glance
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Basic Body Awareness Therapy for Persons With Autism. A Pragmatic Randomized Controlled Study
In Brief
A clinical study evaluating Body awareness therapy for Autism. Completed, enrolled 57 participants across 2 sites.
Detailed Summary
Autism is a diagnosis with certain criteria, especially social and communicative disabilities. Several body functions may be affected to create these disabilities, such as lack of ability to understand that other people think or feel differently than the person with autism, difficulty to experience bodily signals or deviant function of sensory modalities. Several theories describe that our physical, physiological, psychological and existential being can not be separated from each other. The combination of described difficulties in autism makes the perception of the surrounding world or the people within it difficult to understand or interpret, i.e., lack of a sense of coherence. The inner experience of the person as well as the expression of his/her movement qualities will be the effects. There are physiotherapeutic intervention techniques of body awareness, with the purpose to increase the connection to the body and to work with more functional movements. Instead of working with improving the well-being by cognitive top-down techniques, body awareness techniques work bottom-up. The hypothesis is that an intervention with body awareness therapy will increase the possibility for persons with autism to improve movement quality, and increase contact with bodily signals. It will give a better chance to understand and interpret the world and people in different context, conquering a sense of coherence. The study include at least 40 participants with autism randomized to two groups: 1.) intervention once a week for 12 weeks and 2. ) a control group (who will be invited to the therapy after ending study participation). They will be recruited from patient records in habilitation care. The criteria are: having autism, being 15-30 years, not having an intellectual impairment and not having a severe depression. The participants are to have been assessed with the standardized "Basic Body Awareness Scale Movement Quality and Experience", BAS MQ-E, and been found to being relevant participants for body awareness intervention in regard to the expressed individual health problem. Two assessments will be used. The primary one addresses each participants´s individual health problem, using a visual 11-graded scale (NRS), grading the present experience of the health problem. The secondary one is BAS MQ-E. The assessments will be administered as follows: i) prior to; NRS + BAS MQ-E, ii) after 7 occasions; NRS and iii) maximum 2 months after intervention; NRS + BAS MQ-E.
Study Details
Timeline
Interventions
The physiotherapist uses body awareness techniques, i.e. guiding the participant in movement qualities such as stability, breathing, flow and grounding. Conscious awareness focused on bodily experiences is a key component to be able to reflect on what your body signals. As a baseline a standardized observation of the movement quality of the individual is performed. The physiotherapist needs special education in the body awareness technique used, to rightly perform and analyse the observation and administer the intervention. The aim of the body awareness therapy is to raise physical and mental awareness by strengthening the interplay between sensory impressions and motor ability and to gain knowledge of own movement patterns that are not functional and to form alternatives to these.