Labyrinth scale in the differential diagnosis between autism spectrum disorder and language disorder.
Tainá Rossato Benfica, Milena Pondé, Gustavo Marcelino Siquara and 1 others
The Labirinto Scale separated children with autism from those with a language disorder on all four symptom subscales.
Social Interaction was the one subscale where the language-disorder group looked the same as typically developing children.
Key findings
1All four subscales and the total score showed significant differences among the three groups, with the ASD group scoring highest on every subscale.
2The Social Interaction subscale did not separate the language-disorder group from the typically developing group (p=0.310), while the other three subscales did.
3The language-disorder group scored significantly above the typically developing group on Rigid Behavior and Repetitive Gestures, with the highest LD scores in play skills below age expectations rather than in stereotyped movements.
Still to come
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
The LD group was recruited at a different time and in different settings from the ASD and TD groups, and the authors acknowledge that joint and blinded data collection was not possible. The LD group was a convenience sample of 38 children (originally planned as 45) because of the pandemic, so it is smaller than the ASD group. All data come from a single country (Brazil), and the scale is validated for the Brazilian population. The study is cross-sectional: it compares groups at one time point and does not track how the scale performs when the diagnosis is still unknown. The authors themselves note that the scale should be tested with larger samples and in clinical situations where the diagnosis has not yet been established.
Declared interests
No funding or conflicts of interest declared.
The easy way to misread this
Do not read a total Labirinto score above 12 as a confirmation of ASD. The mean score for the language-disorder group was 14.1, which is above that cutoff, and the scale's value here is in separating the two groups from each other, not in a single threshold.
Summarised by AI from the full paper, without a clinician reviewing it. Check it against the source before it changes what you do. Read it on PubMed →