Experimental assessment of seizure-like behaviors in a girl with Rett syndrome

The team ran a single-case functional analysis on a girl with Rett syndrome. They wanted to see if her seizure-like behaviors changed when the environment changed. Mom learned the steps through telehealth and carried them out at home.

Some settings made the seizure-like behaviors more likely, others made them drop. Mom could test these conditions herself after a short online coach-up. The same pattern showed up when she repeated the sessions later.

Ferreri et al. (2011) used the same multielement design to show that odd hand gestures in kids with severe delays were true requests for toys or info. Starbrink adds seizure-like episodes to the list of 'unusual' behaviors that still follow A-B-C logic.

Grindle et al. (2012) proved that even socially quirky acts by students with Asperger’s were maintained by attention. The new case extends that idea to Rett syndrome: once the reinforcer was spotted, the behavior became predictable.

Zyga et al. (2018) and Llanes et al. (2020) already showed parents can master telehealth modules for Prader-Willi and autism. Starbrink is the first to do it for a functional analysis in Rett, closing the distance gap for a rare disorder.

You can now write a behavior plan for seizure-like events without guessing. Train the parent in a Zoom call, run the FA across a weekend, and see which contexts to avoid or enrich. The same steps work for any hard-to-test behavior in low-incidence cases.