Girls with autism
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Anonymous
| Really interesting article about girls with autism and why they might not be diagnosed until later: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/autism-it-s-different-in-girls/ |
Anonymous
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The article makes no sense to me. There is clear diagnostic criteria and I don't understand how some people in the story with diagnoses like the cheerleader, for example, could be found to meet those criteria. While lots of people have social communication issues it has to impact daily life function to be autism. They're also saying girls don't necessarily have narrow interests or repetitive behaviors, which are, again, what they use to diagnose this in the first place.
If they are not using the DSM criteria to diagnose how are they diagnosing?! |
Anonymous
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I think the point is that, for example, repetitive interests look different in boys and girls and an evaluator used to working with boys might miss seeing it in girls. The stereotype of a boy with asperger's is of someone who knows everything about one particular topic and will monologue about that topic. My daughter is nothing like that; instead she has one activity that she does to the exclusion of anything else, although she doesn't necessarily talk about that activity and the activity changes every few months.
Another part of the article that resonated with me was that boys with autism tend to have less social motivation; girls are more likely to want friends but have social communication deficits that interfere. |
Anonymous
| I have a daughter with Aspergers who is 11 and in middle school in DC. And this thread make me think -- I would love to find if there is a girls group, even an informal one with moms where we can get together? |
Anonymous
| I have a 9 yr old girl in DCPS and would love to find just such a group. |
Anonymous
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When our son was diagnosed with Asperger's we were able to go back retroactively and see the traits in my dad and also in myself, a woman.
Since then I have read that girl aspies will often find one good friend who ends up serving as a translator for the aspie girl. They end up with a friendship where the aspie child is really dependent on this one friend who essentially explains a lot of what is going on to the aspie kid (i.e. "He's asking about you because he likes you", etc.) This really resonated with me and explained most of the friendships I had had in my lifetime. It may be this friendship pattern that helps an aspie girl to pass as normal. I actually see these friendship patterns in my own daughter as well -- befriending one child who is much more social and much more socially aware. It's helpful but not necessarily healthy if that makes sense. . |
Anonymous
Ivymount Outreach runs a group just for girls. You could also check meetup.com for parenting/kids groups. |
Anonymous
I agree with you. If autism is "totally different" with girls and boys, how is it the same condition? And this article makes a big deal about the differences between male and female brains, which is being readily debunked: http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2015/11/brains-men-and-women-aren-t-really-different-study-finds. What I can believe is that our gender expectations frame what we perceive in girls and boys. So, as the article notes, an girl's obsession with American Girl dolls may seem normal, whereas a boy's obsession with cars may not be. Maybe parents and other caregivers make more of an effort to socialize with girls than boys, resulting in autistic girls having marginally better social skills. I also wonder about all the brain imaging they are doing to come to their conclusions. You generally can't give anesthesia to children as part of a research study because it is too risky. So these MRIs must have been on older children, once *socially* imposed gender norms took effect. |
Anonymous
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This part was the scariest to me:
"In this way, autism may be more painful for women. Autistic people who do not seem interested in social life probably do not obsess about what they are missing—but those who want to connect and cannot are tormented by their loneliness. A study published in 2014 by Baron-Cohen and his colleagues found that 66 percent of adults with the milder form of ASD (so-called Asperger's) reported suicidal thoughts, a rate nearly 10 times higher than that seen in the general population. The proportion was 71 percent among women, who made up about one third of the sample." 71% is really high, and that's just reported suicidal thoughts. |
Anonymous
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As someone who works in this field, this spoke to me quite a bit. I've run into quite a few girls over the years who fit the patterns described in this article much more readily than the traditional autism diagnosis, and who therefore bounced from diagnosis to diagnosis trying to find something that fit them and their needs. I had been thinking of them in terms of social communication disorder since they didn't have the stereotyped, repetitive interest of my boys, but that never seemed like a perfect fit either.
And yes, to the PP who talked about how male and female brains are actually very similar, I agree with you about their structure and the confines of social expectations related to gender. But it does stand to reason that being exposed to too much testosterone in utero would have a different effect on a male-already with more testosterone- vs a female. That was where the part about female ASD brains reacting like NT male brains made a lot of sense to me. |
Anonymous
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There was another article I just saw about how people with autism live 18 years less than the average life expectancy and it was because of a high rate of suicide.
It also singled out girls with HFA as being the group that is hit the hardest. I think Alvord Baker has a social skills group for girls on the spectrum. |
Anonymous
| I guess I would ask: if autism looks so different in girls (1) should we call it something else? and (2) are the treatments the same for the girl with autism vs the boy? |
Anonymous
It's probably the same neurologically with the same gene mutations. I think gender does make a difference in how things are perceived. Like a boy might be seen as a leader vs. a girl might be perceived as bossy for displaying the same kind of trait. |
Anonymous
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But the researchers say that the biology of the girls' brains looks different than the boys' so isn't it a different thing then?
So if the symptoms are different (narrow interests and all that) and the images of the brain are different what in the world is leading them to conclude it's the same thing? Also, what if a boy had the degree of symptoms as some of the girls. That is, the boy has more social motivation and friends, intense interests that can last a few months but it don't dominate his conversations, and all the characteristics that the researchers are saying are autism in girls. Would they then diagnose autism in those boys as well who right now would probably not meet the threshold for being diagnosed? |
Anonymous
The MRIs are extremely preliminary and based on a small sample, however the article says, "In short, the brain of a girl with autism may be more like the brain of a typical boy than that of a boy with autism..." ASD is more common in boys, so you get a diagnosis bias. The key point of the article is that "social and personal factors that may help females mask or compensate for the symptoms of ASD better than males do..." It's still autism; social constructs then later sex hormones complicate the matter, but it's still autism. |