Reply to Wall Street Journal: The Autism Diagnosis That Isn’t Always Permanent

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Reply to "Wall Street Journal: The Autism Diagnosis That Isn’t Always Permanent"

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]The follow up was when the kids averaged 6 1/2 years old. So it is still too early to tell what happens to these kids when they are adults. I hope they continue to follow these kids into adulthood. [/quote]

The avg age for kids diagnosed with Asperger’s is 8 yrs old.  Kids with Aspergers/autism, level 1, obviously miss an earlier autism diagnosis since they do not have speech delays and the autism isn’t apparent until they are older and in school.  Since  the study was conducted on younger kids who received an autism diagnosis at a young age, they all had very obvious autistic traits.[/quote]
Level 1 kids can have speech delays. The levels have to do with levels of support needed, not speech delays.  Speech delays are very noticeable, so I imagine a lot of the kids caught early are brought in for that.  But they can still catch up on speech later, or fail to catch up but not need a lot of support.

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True.  This is why there is no more Asperger’s and High Functioning Autism (HFA).  It use to be that mildly affected autistic kids without speech delays would be diagnosed with Asperger’s and mildly affected autistic kids with speech delays would be diagnosed with HFA under the DSM-4.

It was found that there was no significant difference in outcomes between HFA and Asperger’s once the kids with HFA caught up in language.  Thus under the DSM-5, there is no longer HFA or Asperger’d just autism, level 1.

In the study, they were only looking at the kids who have HFA since they were diagnosed at a very young age.  It is definitely possible for some of these kids to lose the diagnosis once their language catches up.  According to the study, it said the ones that lost the diagnosis had very “mild” symptoms to begin with.[/quote]

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