Psychiatric disorders in children with earlier infantile spasms.

In order to evaluate the occurrence of psychiatric disorder following infantile spasms, a long-term follow-up study (between three and 19 years) was made of 192 children in Finland. Psychiatric disorders were found in 53 of the children. 24 had infantile autism (transient in 14 cases), 16 of whom were also hyperkinetic, as were an additional 29 cases from the whole group. Considerable muscular hypotonia was frequently combined with infantile autism, but both tended to decrease with age. Autistic children often had psychomotor epilepsy and temporal lobe abnormalities, which suggests that organic lesions with a specific localization may be a pathophysiological basis for autism. In addition, the hyperkinetic children had more focal temporal abnormalities in their EEGs than did the children without psychiatric disorders.