AS onset at age 5-6 or ...?

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I've been told by the young psych who administered the IQ test to me during the dx-ing process that one of the reasons they think I don't have AS is that my symptoms 'at the most important age of 5-6' were mild, and that my problems started only later, at age 7 or 8...

Thread: http://www.wrongplanet.net/postt137964.html
Under subtitle 'Course': http://aspergeradults.ca/aspergersdsm-crit.html

I'm curious what your opinion is?

(btw, I'm 39 this day)

My son was diagnosed with aspergers just before his 9th birthday. He had some signs earlier in life but it was not till 7-8 he showed more signs so he could be diagnosed.

I believe I read somewhere that Tony Attwood said that onset for aspergers is common between 7-8 years, I know I read it in more than one place. This makes sense because social interactions become more difficult between 7-8 than earlier. This seems quite common, I was on a training course recently for parents of children recently diagnosed and most were 7-8 years too.

I was not diagnosed until 19, but when I was young no one had even heard of it in the UK. But in an old cine film, when I was seven I showed a lot of signs.

(cine film was before videos for you youngsters out there)

I have not read anything. But I would say to get a accurate answer, would be in this country 12 - 16 year old due to "social communication" been more important at "secondary school". While primary school would be more playful.

Really you can look at this like shy person:-

You can have it as you born & goes away when older.
You can get it later.
Or you can have it not at all.

Edit:- missed out ( Or your naturally shy )

I obviously don't know the details of your circumstances but I think it absurd to think that people who didn't know you 32+ years ago can make any assumptions based upon what either you or anybody else tells them; far too much time has now passed.

In any case I don't see how anyone is able to say with any certainty when the symptoms of AS should manifest, given differing severity, character, environment and experiences.

Once again, the "experts" are being shown up for making this stuff up as they go along. The whole field of psychology is awash with charlatans.

I'm not diagnosed even now but there is a lot of stuff from when I was a kid that I don't remember and if I ask my mother she says she doesn't remember like recently when I asked her when I started talking.

I remember some report referring to me as "becoming symptomatic" I think in fourth grade but I still wasn't actually diagnosed with anything and had problems before that. They just started noticing it more because I had to go to a different and bigger school with new kids that weren't used to my oddness and bullied me a lot more.

Here in the UK according to The National Autistic Society - it usally apears between 7-8 years.

A diagnosis between 12 - 16 years is very later here.

This is very true, it will depend on so many factors and one very important thing, WHO is picking them up, staff in schools who are not trained what to look for means it can very easily be missed and put down to other things, and don't get referred to a specialist until they are much older.

I will bold my part, as I was referring to my point of view. Based on shy person.

From what I've read its not uncommon for traits to not be strong enough to be noticed by a non-specialist before puberty, yet once they look back they see the traits for the kid's entire life.

The two points that tend to be associated with it being much more visible are entering school and puberty (and to a lesser degree, a third point is leaving school). These are associated with jumps in expectation, and its at those jumps that people's impairments become most visible.

(In my case it was identified at 13, at the puberty step, but looking back you can see traits of me being abnormal much younger than that.)

That seems like an incredibly flimsy reason to discount AS! There are all kinds of factors that could impact when and how someone's symptoms show up, including overall mildness/severity of symptoms, what 'type' of Aspie you were as a child (approach, avoidance, fixated, or disruptive), your environment, your culture, your special interest, etc, etc.

I've read many of your posts, and I know that you feel that your PDD-NOS diagnosis doesn't fit, and it seems to me that you should seek a second opinion, given the stringent and unrealistic criteria you were being assessed against! There's no age of symptom onset mentioned in the DSM-IV, and as others have mentioned here, it seems experts in the area believe it shows up right around the time your symptoms did.

Prior to age 9, most of my symptoms were mild and more secondary; special interest, hyperfocus, embarrassment with praise and not knowing how to show excitement, spending more time with teachers than peers, early memorization and reading skills, not much interest in toys/cartoons, etc. However, I was very outgoing...I'd walk up to someone I just met and climb into their lap. Of course, that's not 'normal', either, but it's more acceptable and even seen as 'cute' when children do such things. My real social issues started when my environment changed (age 8, was taken from grandmother), and got much worse when middle school began (age 11), because I'd always been 'one of the boys' in elementary school, and it was just not acceptable for a girl to be a tomboy anymore in middle school. I didn't know how to socialize outside of that mold.

I had only the most basic of symptoms at age 6. My major social problems began when I was about 8. Using your "young psych's" definition of AS, I would test negative. However, based on my own research on my condition, there is no doubt in my mind that I have AS. My symptoms have waned somewhat, and if I were tested today I would be borderline. If I had been tested at age 8, though, there would have been no question. - LJS

I am very strange then, because looking back (in photos and videos of me as a baby and what my parents can remember) I was a typical baby and toddler, I mixed well with other children at preschool and I was developing typically and reached all the milestones at the average stages. Then on my very first day of school at 4 and a half years old, I couldn't cope at all and behaved in a way that got the teachers worried, and my parents very concerned, and from then onwards I had to be taken to a doctor and family support therapists to find out why I was behaving this way at school. But ASDs wasn't suspected until I was about 7, and then I received an official diagnosis of Dyspraxia and mild AS at 8.

My mom says my symptoms started around third grade but I know I had them before that. I can remember my rigidness and not liking change long before that, even in my preschool years. I don't know why my mom said they started when I was in third grade. Plus I remember my difficulty with friends despite that I had them and that was long before I was nine years old. Maybe that was when she started to notice? :shrugs:

Sometimes symptoms to get more noticeable as the kid gets older.

Autism/Asperger's are neurological disorders present from birth. However, for the first few years all children are fairly similar in behavior--baby like, toddler like, and so on, until their personalities and age appropriate maturities start to develop. Once that starts to happen, then people start to notice when a particular child is not developing the same as the other kids. The exact age will vary as the severity and types of disorder traits each spectrum child has varies. The experience and capability of adults in contact with the child also affects the age of diagnosis. Those with less ability and less experience will naturally take longer to figure out that something really is different about the child, and what that difference might be.

I am in my early 50s. Spectrum disorders were not recognized as such back when I was growing up. We were diagnosed as having emotional/behavioral problems, and/or being discipline problems. Based on my own memory I was mostly okay--still relating all right with other kids in nursery school, but started having serious problems in kindergarten--when I was about 5. Although my memories of many things that far back are somewhat spotty and dim, I am absolutely sure of this particular issue. It made an impression on me partly because that's when the other kids started really tormenting me, but also because of the bafflement it caused me, since even then I couldn't understand how things could have been normal the year before in nursery school, but the next year things were so bad. And school never got any better after that. The nursery school was a different school in a neighboring town, so some of the kids were different, but probably not all of them.

If they had been diagnosing spectrum disorders back then, then I believe the earliest I could have been diagnosed would have been right about at 5 years old, because that's when I parted ways with normal childhood development.

Yes, the cry symbol is called for, even this far away in time. I weep for the child that was so tormented by the other children, and who was never understood well or helped enough by the adults. They didn't take my problems seriously, just my reactions to those problems. My reactions--mostly meltdowns--were taken as the problem, so I was taken to many different psych docs and therapists to try to "cure" my reactions, not to cure the cause of the problems. Naturally, when you try to cure the reaction and not the cause, you don't get anywhere.

Oh how I wish I had been home schooled back then, but that was not commonly done back then.

Parents, parents, please, please, if your kids are really having a tough time in school with the other kids, have mercy on them! Rescue them from their torment! HOME SCHOOL THEM! Besides, they won't learn as well and will really get turned off of schooling if you force them to go to HELL every school day. You will also be hurting your relationship with them, too. Trust me on this. It is hard to love or respect an adult who forces you to go to HELL every school day. Set your child free from their tormentors. HOME SCHOOL your tortured child!

The symptoms are generally there from birth, but they may not cause any disability until the teen years, or even early adulthood. It all depends on the exact symptoms and the environment you live in.

Ask yourself whether you had those traits before they started causing trouble, and you may be able to figure out whether you're dealing with AS traits or something else.

I'd like to say thank you for your posts. This time I'd restrain myself from exposing my opinion as I don't want to sway yours in any way. Actually, I plan to print out the result and perhaps the posts and give it to them if you don't mind.

Questor, special thanks to you for sharing your thoughts about the difficulties you have had.