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SYSTEMATIC REVIEW article
Front. Pediatr.
Sec. Children and Health
Volume 13 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fped.2025.1498563
The effect of game-based interventions on children and adolescents with autism spectrum disorder：A systematic review and meta-analysis
Provisionally accepted- 1 Chengdu University of Traditional Chinese Medicine, Chengdu, China
- 2 Shanghai Fourth People's Hospital, Shanghai, China
Purpose: The purpose of this meta-analysis was to conduct a comprehensive evaluation of randomized controlled trials (RCTs) of game-based interventions (GBI) for children and adolescents with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) to identify the clinical efficacy of GBI on core symptoms and other concomitant symptoms of ASD. Methods: PubMed, Web of Science, Embase and the Cochrane Library were systematically searched for articles published until July 2023.Results: Twenty-four studies with 1801 patients met the inclusion criteria. The results showed that GBI had a significant positive effect on social skills (g = -0.59, p = 0.004), social behaviors (g = 0.45, p < 0.001), and cognition (g = 0.57, p < 0.001) in children and adolescents with ASD, while the effects of language expression (g = 0.15), anxiety (g = -0.13), and parenting stress (g = -0.51) were small and nonsignificant.Conclusions: The results of the current meta-analysis showed that GBI was effective in improving social skills, social behaviors and cognition in children and adolescents with ASD in the existing studies and was not significant in improving language skills, anxiety and parental stress, but due to the limited number and low quality of the included studies, the above conclusions need to be validated by conducting more large-sample, high-quality RCTs.
Keywords: Autism Spectrum Disorder, game-based interventions, Children, adolescence, Meta-analysis
Received: 19 Sep 2024; Accepted: 18 Mar 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Gao, Wei, Huang, Zhang and Ke. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence:
Anren Zhang, Shanghai Fourth People's Hospital, Shanghai, China
Xiaohua Ke, Shanghai Fourth People's Hospital, Shanghai, China
Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.