Aversive eating in autism; is further support needed for families?
Research type
Research Study
Full title
A qualitative study of the impact of aversive eating for patients with autism and their families under community paediatrics in Leeds Community Healthcare Trust.
IRAS ID
349795
Contact name
Anne MacCafferty
Contact email
Sponsor organisation
University of Leeds
Duration of Study in the UK
0 years, 8 months, 1 days
Research summary
My research will be working with parents/carers who have a child with a diagnosis of autism. I aim to explore any concerns they have regarding their child's eating habits. Restrictive eating is very common within autism. This has numerous implications including nutritional deficiency, growth restriction and brain development. Children with extremely self limited diets may meet the criteria for a diagnosis of avoidant restrictive food intake disorder (ARFID). This diagnosis is still relatively new, first described in the DSM-V classification in 2013, and as such there is limited knowledge amongst healthcare professionals and consequentially support for families. I wish to understand more about the scale of the problem locally and specifically identify parents opinions and concerns surrounding the support for ARFID, with the aim to identify areas for service improvement.
The following questions will be addressed:
- How concerned are parents about the restricted eating?
- What is the impact of restricted eating on the child and family for every day life?
- How is eating restricted e.g. number of "safe" foods, brands of foods, mealtime set up
- What support have they sought and where from?
- How helpful has this support been?Patients will be asked to complete a short questionnaire made up of single best answer and white space questions, following which I will analyse the data using a mixture of quantitative and qualitative methods. It is anticipated that the results of the analysis will enable me to make recommendations for local service development.
REC name
West of Scotland REC 5
REC reference
25/WS/0147
Date of REC Opinion
11 Sep 2025
REC opinion
Favourable Opinion