The Effect of Two Weight Reduction Maintenance Strategies for Moderately/Mildly Retarded Adults

Thirteen retarded adult subjects were first exposed to a 12-week behavior therapy weight reduction program followed by a ten-month weekly weigh-in. Then the subjects were randomly assigned to an experimental maintenance booster session group (n=7) or a control post-treatment maintenance group (n=6) for 12 months. The results indicated that when weight control or maintenance procedures were in effect, the subjects lost weight. However, a 12-month follow-up check revealed that the long-term success of the treatment and maintenance procedures was not well maintaned

Changes in Biomedical and Physical Correlates in Behavioral Weight Loss with Retarded Youths

Seventeen trainable mentally retarded youths were assigned to either a behavior therapy (N = 6), an obese wait·list control group (N = 5) or a normal weight control group (N = 6). The behavior therapy subjects lost significantly more weight than the two control groups who gained weight. The behavior therapy subjects achieved significant reductions in tricep skin· fold thickness, abdominal circumferences, and diastolic blood pressure measures by the end of the 21·week treatment program. The advantages of using multiple dependent measures is discussed

Spanish Adaptation of the Autism Spectrum Disorders - Diagnosis for Adults (ASD-DA) in Adults with Severe and Profound Intellectual Disability

The Autism Spectrum Disorders - Diagnosis for Adults (ASD-DA) with intellectual disability was designed to quickly provide relevant information to establish a diagnosis of the most common Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) (autism, pervasive developmental disorder not otherwise specified and Asperger's syndrome) (Matson et al. 2007a). The ASD-DA was adapted and translated into Spanish and administered to a sample of 156 adults with severe (n = 67, 42.9%) and profound (n = 89, 57.1%) intellectual disability. Seventy-one (45.5%) participants had a diagnosis of intellectual disability and autism spectrum disorder, and the other eighty-five (54.5%) had a diagnosis of intellectual disability without autism spectrum disorder. The reliability scores of the scales implied values in the "good-to-excellent" range (0.78-0.95), and test-retest reliability was obtained with good values for most of the items on the scale. A three-factor structure was replicated via confirmatory factor analysis. Participants with and without ASD showed significant differences in the three ASD-DA scales and in their total scores. Using a receiver operating characteristics (ROC) curve, a score of 21 on the ASD-DA scale showed good specificity (0.97) and sensitivity (0.92) values with respect to DSM-IV-TR criteria