Why the study?
A link between ASD and joint hypermobility-related disorders is rarely established in clinical practice despite evidence of co-occurrence, and increasing awareness is needed because pain in people with ASD often remains disregarded and untreated.
Increasing awareness of the interconnection between ASD and hypermobility-related disorders may help identify ASD patients susceptible to disregarded and untreated chronic pain.
May warrant screening ASD patients for hypermobility to identify chronic pain risk; leaves open shared etiology and clinical integration.
Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) and Joint Hypermobility-Related Disorders are blanket terms for two etiologically and clinically heterogeneous groups of pathologies that usually appears in childhood. These conditions are seen by different medical fields, such as psychiatry in the case of ASD, and musculoskeletal disciplines and genetics in the case of hypermobility-related disorders. Thus, a link between them is rarely established in clinical setting, despite a scarce but growing body of research suggesting that both conditions co-occur more often than expected by chance. Hypermobility is a frequent sign of hereditary disorders of connective tissue (e.g., Ehlers-Danlos syndromes, Marfan syndrome), in which the main characteristic is the multisystem fragility that prone to proprioceptive and motor coordination dysfunction and hence to trauma and chronic pain. Considering the high probability that pain remains disregarded and untreated in people with ASD due to communication and methodological difficulties, increasing awareness about the interconnection between ASD and hypermobility-related disorders is relevant, since it may help identify those ASD patients susceptible to chronic pain.
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Baeza‐Velasco et al. (2018) studied this question.
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