Letter to the Editor: ‘Key links between autistic characteristics and anxiety symptoms in autistic children and youth’: a response to Lai et al. (2026)

This Response addresses methodological and conceptual issues raised in a Letter to the Editor concerning our recently published network analysis of autism characteristics and anxiety symptoms in autistic children and youth. We clarify concerns related to potential conceptual overlap between autistic characteristics and anxiety-related symptoms and address questions concerning the multinational nature of the dataset. We also summarize sensitivity and stability analyses showing that the identified bridge nodes are robust to variation in regularization parameters and operational definitions. Together, these clarifications support the interpretation of the reported network findings.