What Parents Should Know About Motor Stereotypies

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MOTOR STEREOTYPIES ARE RHYTHMIC, REPETITIVE MOVEMENTS, OFTEN DEVELOPING IN EARLY CHILDHOOD.
We all engage in motor stereotypies. So some people might tap their legs. Some people might bite their nails and that's what we call a simple motor stereotypy. The kids that we see in our study are engaging in what we call complex motor stereotypies. Those tend to have their own rhythm. So it may include kind of a combination of different movements. Kids tend to have their own signature stereotypies.
Motor stereotypies don't always exist on their own in isolation. They often exist along with other symptoms. - Motor stereotypies are present in about 60% of children with autism. But we also see motor stereotypies is in children who are otherwise developing typically.
Complex motor stereotypies typically appear in the second year of life. In some children they may simply disappear. However, in other children, they tend to persist into adulthood. Research at Yale shows that complex stereotypies in toddlers may signal presence of other developmental vulnerabilities, and vulnerabilities may include social, language, or modal delays. In some children, these delays can be relatively mild. In other children, they can be more significant.
We want to understand where these stereotypies come from and also what they mean about a child's trajectory.
IT IS IMPORTANT FOR PARENTS AND PROVIDERS TO KNOW WHEN INTERVENTIONS ARE APPROPRIATE FOR COMPLEX MOTOR STEREOTYPIES.
Just because motor stereotypies exist, does not mean that we have to intervene. There are many children who talk about, ‘I like to do this when I'm happy. I like to do this when I'm nervous. This makes me part of who I am.’ And in those moments, we don't want to change how they’re understanding their stereotypies or how it's being manifested. Because first and foremost, we have to protect the child's self-esteem.
However, there are some individuals where stereotypies really do get in the way. They can, even in some extreme circumstances, become self-injurious and so certainly we'd want to intervene there.
We need to help the child find other ways of kind of understanding what's going on in their body and manifesting it in safe ways.
Right now, the only effective treatment that we have for stereotypies is behavioral therapy. We're limited in our treatment approaches, and not all children can access them and receive them in the same way and, because of that, we need some new treatment choices for some of our families.
NEW RESEARCH STUDIES THE GENETIC ORIGIN OF MOTOR STEREOTYPIES ACROSS THE DEVELOPMENT SPECTRUM.
We are taking a transdiagnostic approach, which means that we are actually bringing in children with a variety of conditions and children who are developing typically and what brings them together is that they all have some form of motor stereotypies.
We have families who have some concerns around their child's motor movement. We are offering them a comprehensive evaluation so that involves parent interviews to hear how the child is doing in their everyday life and we're also implementing evidence-based assessments to understand different parts of their development.
Just like with other neuropsychiatric disorders which we study, there is a family history in children with motor stereotypies. We’re using whole exome sequencing and by looking at this readout, we can compare it to individuals that do not have motor stereotypies and see where the differences are. Once we find the differences, we can then ask question, well, do these differences or mutations affect the function of the gene? And if so, then we pay more attention to those mutations. They are usually involved in more than one disorder or condition. We think that by isolating genetic causes of stereotypies, we can then parse out the different symptoms that are within some of these other disorders and figure out the biology of each of the components of those disorders. If we understand more about the biology of the condition, then we can develop new approaches, new therapies that would target the condition more effectively.
For us to have a better understanding of intervention, we need to have a really good understanding of what assessments are effective and where those behaviors come from.
Trying to understand what gives rise to motor stereotypies can help us understand what brings us all together in our neurodiverse universe. - We're all different, right? And we all get to express ourselves in different ways and that, I think, can lend itself to a much more accepting and much more interesting society.