A recent study has found that to best help kids with autism maintain healthy rates of physical activity, interventions should be targeted during the ages of 9 to 13, as that’s when kids show the biggest drop in active time.

The study is one of the first to look at this issue on a longitudinal scale. It relied on a dataset of families in Ireland spanning three in-depth interviews between 2007 and 2016. Kids in the survey had their first interview at age 9, the second at 13 and the third at 17 or 18.

The OSU study compared 88 children with autism to 88 children without autism over the nine-year survey period to gauge both how physical activity changed over time, and how much screen time — spent on TV, movies, videos and computer and video games — children reported over time.

While there was not a statistically significant difference in screen time between kids with autism and kids without it, there was a marked disparity in the amount of physical activity, especially in adolescence.

At 13, youth with autism reported only one or two days of moderate to vigorous physical activity in the previous two weeks, compared with nine or more days among youth without autism.

«We don’t always know when and how to intervene for kids with autism,» said study author Megan MacDonald, an associate professor in OSU’s College of Public Health and Human Sciences. «This paper doesn’t necessarily tell us that, but it gives us some insight on when this disparity widens and the age range where we start to see these deficits.

Story Source:
Materials provided by Oregon State University. Original written by Molly Rosbach. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.