Reply to Interesting new study about the 4 types of autism

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I am thrilled at this development, as a parent of a child with "mild" autism, because it offers a path for both better understanding the specific challenges my kid faces, and also possibly to make it easier to identify the appropriate supports and therapies.

Here are the categories (my summary from the Princeton Engineering article):

[b]Social and Behavioral Challenges[/b]. Show core autism traits (including social challenges and repetitive behaviors), but meet developmental milestones on time. Often co-occurring with ADHD, anxiety, OCD, and other disorders.

[b]Mixed ASD with Developmental Delay[/b]. Mixed presentation of autism traits (may have repetitive behaviors but not social challenges, or vice versa). Tends to reach developmental milestones like walking and talking later than is typical.

[b]Moderate Challenges[/b]. Show core autism behaviors but but less strongly than other groups. Meet developmental milestones all time. Does not tend to co-occur with other conditions such as ADHD and anxiety.

[b]Broadly Affected[/b]. More extreme and wide-ranging presentation of autism behaviors. Includes not only social issues and repetitive behaviors, but also communication issues, and is very likely to co-occur with other psychiatric disorders, including mood disorders.

The last group, what people would think of as classic autism prior to the recent expansion of the category to include a broader range of behaviors, was the smallest group in the kids they studied (just 10% of participants got this classification).

My kid would probably be categorized in the first group. One thing I really like about the categories is that it's not a strict continuum from "mild" to "severe". Rather, they are looking at three metrics (severity of autism behaviors, developmental impacts, and co-occurring diagnoses) to group kids by the types of challenges they may face. This is much more useful than trying to explain my kid has "mild to moderate" autism which doesn't really capture what is going on.

I could also see this being useful in the conversation about when it is appropriate or beneficial to mainstream kids and when they may be better off in a specialized classroom. [/quote]

Thanks for this. My kid would fall under the first category. She doesn't have expressive language delays (just pragmatic) or intellectual disabilities, so wouldn't fall in the broadly affected category, but has social difficulties, executive dysfunction, and restrictive interests that make life far more difficult than the "smart and quirky" Asperger's types. No one who talks to her for 10 minutes would doubt the autism.[/quote]

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