Dados do Trabalho

Título

AUTISM AND URBANIZATION - A SYSTEMATIC REVIEW

Introdução

Is there a relation between autism spectrum disorder (ASD) prevalence and urbanization?
A lot of studies have been published about this topic since the decade of 1980. There are 3 systematic reviews about this topic in the medical literature so far: two restricted to the Indian and Chinese population and one published in 2005 envolving studies from different countries.
There is data pointing to the tendence of autism being more prevalent in the urbanised areas, however this is not a defined topic in the medical literature yet. This systematic review aims to explore this association with the analysis of journal articles published from 2005 on.

Objetivo

This study aims to review the existent literature from 2005 on regarding the association between autism and urbanization and answer the question:
Is the prevalence of autism higher in urbanized areas?

Método

We have searched for observational articles with the following keywords: ("Autism") AND ("Rural“) AND ("Urban").
The inclusion criteria were:
- Journal articles published after 2005;
- Written in English;
- Published in Pubmed/ Scopus/ Web Of Science;
- Observational studies;
- Studies whose research focus was the association between prevalence of autism and urbanization
The exclusion criteria were:
- Journal articles published before 2005;
- Editorials and comments;
- Studies focused on accessibility to treatment in rural x urban areas;

Resultados

We identified a total of 173 journal articles published in Pubmed/ Scopus/ Web Of Science with the keywords considered.
After filtering duplicates, 113 articles were left (there were 60 duplicates).
Of these 113 articles,
95 were excluded by the following reasons: Editorial (n = 1); Comment on abstract (n = 1); Case study (n = 1); Unavailable (n = 1); Published before 2005 (n = 4); Does not relate ASD prevalence with urbanization (n = 87).
Afterall, we screened 18 articles for this systematic review, whose research focus was to demonstrate the prevalence of autism in urban and rural areas.

Conclusão

This resume is a previous description about this systematic review, which is being developed at present.
The data so far has showed that there is a higher prevalence of autism in the urbanised areas compared to rural areas.

Palavras-chave

AUTISM, RURAL, URBAN