The VABS-II adaptive composite standard score was used for the analysis, as were the raw scores from the Social,
Communication and Daily Living domains. Raw scores were used because previous research has suggested that raw scores better reflect the incremental adaptive skill changes of individual with ASDs than do the scaled scores . Comparing baseline and post-THR assessments for the VABS-II, significant improvements were observed for the Adaptive Total score (p = 0.001), the Communication raw score (p = 0.035), the Social raw score (p = 0.016) and the Daily Living raw score (p = 0.011). Based on the significant improvement observed on the VABS Communication raw score, it was thought to be important to examine the subscales of this measure. The VABS-II Communication domain assesses both expressive and receptive language abilities. These domain raw scores were examined using paired t-tests and it was found that participants displayed significant improvement on the measure of expressive language (p = 0.005), but there was only a trend toward improvement on the measure of receptive language (p = 0.061, n.s.).