Chinese Chan-Based Prospective Neuropsychological Intervention for Autistic Children

Abstract

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD), as a neurodevelopmental disorder, is to date incurable and has pervasive impact on cognitive, social, behavioral, and physical aspects of affected individuals. Recently, interest has been aroused in scientifically studying and clinically applying various complementary and alternative intervention methods for children with ASD. Mind-body intervention is one of the frequently adopted techniques. Given the fundamental assumption that the mind and the body are interconnected, the ultimate outcome of mind-body intervention is to enhance simultaneously the mental and the physical health conditions of an individual, which can potentially be applied as a cost-effective approach to treat children with ASD. This chapter will introduce a newly developed Chinese Chan-based mind-body intervention, namely, Dejian mind-body intervention (DMBI), which has been clinically applied for hundreds of years in China and empirically studied in the past few years. Both clinical and scientific evidence has supported the effects of DMBI in enhancing mood, cognitive functions, physical wellness, and neurophysiological state of normal population and patients with different brain disorders. Specifically for the children with ASD, results of randomized controlled trial and case studies, as well as some preliminary data, have suggested positive outcomes of DMBI on improving their executive control of emotion and behavior, memory and learning, immunological function, and physical health conditions and on normalizing their deviated brain activity level. More importantly, the encouraging findings were also applied to the more impaired ASD children with mental retardation and/or deficient verbal abilities. The potential treatment efficacy and clinical applicability of DMBI as a neuropsychological intervention for children with ASD will be discussed.