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]

This is interesting.  My DC has straddled many of the diagnoses as they keep twiddling with them.  First he had pragmatic- semantic disorder - with other issues. Then PDD-nos but not Asperger’s. Now it’s Level 1.  None were a great fit. However with this description, he looks like he is more in the second group than the first as he sat up late, crawled late, walked at 16 months and was a person of few words (very well articulated however) for a long time.  He wasn’t considered “development delay”, but he was edging towards it.  As an adult he still has some hypotonia and coordination issues. He was in a social skills class from 3rd grade to HS graduation and credits it with his success in college.  We are all math and science geeks in our family and everyone has a smattering of autistic traits, but he ended up with a few more. He did well in college and has a good job now. He is intelligent and is the stereotypical computer engineer so I think his autistic traits are known entities at his workplace. He is within that norm. He moved out a few years ago. He still needs some prodding and I think he should get a cleaning lady, but otherwise he is almost independent now as he heads toward his 30th birthday.  Delayed, but getting there.

He still is very rigid on some things and when he hits his limit on socialization, he is done.

Since he was well behaved in school and did well academically, he never had an IEP or 504. However, we did have him move to a different ES in the middle because the grade social interactions were terrible.  
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