Applying the World Health Organization's International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health to speech-language pathology social communication interventions for autistic children and youth: A scoping review.

The review did not check whether the included studies were high quality or likely to be biased. No included study had participants older than 12 years, even though the search aimed to include youth, so the findings do not cover adolescents. None of the included studies explicitly referenced the ICF, so the ICF mapping was made by the reviewers from intervention descriptions. Intervention descriptions varied in detail, and nine studies did not define any social communication terms, so what was targeted may not be fully known. The authorship team did not include autistic researchers or people with lived experience, and the authors are Canadian, cisgender, neurotypical healthcare providers. The review included only studies with speech-language pathology involvement, so social communication interventions delivered by other disciplines were outside its scope. The included studies came from seven countries, with the United States and Canada being the most frequent locations, so cultural and service-system context may not generalise widely.

The first author was funded by a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Canada Graduate Scholarship Doctoral Award. The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest for the research, authorship or publication.

Do not read this as evidence that the reviewed interventions improve social communication. The paper's stated objective was to describe how speech-language pathology social communication interventions map onto the ICF, and it did not check whether the included studies were high quality or likely to be biased.