Do you think AS is really autism?

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i think the only thing thats unique and why As hasn't been taken out of the autistic spectrum of disorders and put somewhere else is "the limited, narrow areas of intrests, these people show."
thats the killer right there. i mean where are you gonna put that!

I don't mind, I can clearly see the similarities and understand how autistic people describe how they think.
As I see it, AS is kind of like the shallow end of the autism pool.

However, Kanner's autism which is considered "classic" autism is just assumed to have been the more low functioning or severely involved. Actually Kanner's autism also included a spectrum and some of the children he worked with later on had integrated successfully into society and were fully independent and had college degrees. And all without the traditional interventions used today.

My son has HFA but also realize that people move up and across the spectrum with kids receiving different diagnosis of Autism, Asperger's and PDD-NOS depending really on the personal inclinations of the diagnostician and their interpretations of how the child presents. And really the concepts of low and high functioning and the ideas that language development is really an indicator of AS or autism are being challenged. Many with AS have been mislabeled with other mental conditions or personality disorders and to a lessor extent the reverse may be true. The whole issue is really how difficult it is even to decide on the correct label to put on people. In light of that how accurate would it be to try and creat a completely seperate classification for those with AS.

Yes, I think it is definitely related to Autistic Disorder. Research by Dr. M. F. Casanova et al. (2002) supports this idea. It shows that the cases studied postmortem show similar minicolumnar abnormalities although in a lesser variant as those found in Autistic Disorder. Please note specifically the bold.

I think this is a difficult one.

On the one hand I've sometimes thought that the Autistic Spectrum is so wide that a diagnosis of ASD means very little indeed.

But on the other hand, there is a strong genetic connection, which would imply that they are in the same family of conditions. Eg: “There is evidence that high functioning autism and Asperger's Syndrome have a strong genetic basis. G. R. DeLong and J. T. Dyer found that two thirds of families with a high functioning autistic had either a first or second degree relative with Asperger's Syndrome. (http://www.autism.org/temple/genius.html)”

I'm not sure that there's any benefit in using more precise terms when diagnosing people, especially young children, as it's difficult to predict how that person will develop. (The C.D.C.s which diagnosed my boys were of that opinion and only ever use the umbrella term ASD)

However, I do think that there are dangers in separating off AS from the other ASDs. I'm concerned that if people think of autism in terms of the lower functioning end of the spectrum and ignore the fact that so many brilliant people have AS traits, then the genetic research will be used to eradicate autistic genes from the population. I know the official line is "Once we discover these susceptibility genes, we can immediately screen infants to identify those at risk early in life. Early identification can lead to early intervention.....” (Geraldine Dawson, director of the UW's Autism Center) but I find it difficult to believe that it will be used for that purpose. My eldest son was diagnosed about four years ago and apart from some occasional (and useless) speech therapy, he's had no help/intervention at all – and he is not an exception.

I feel a rant coming on. Better go now.

Appassionata, that's true and the opposite is also a possible risk, that separating AS from ASD (as is done in California) would dismiss the idea that AS is a learning disability at all. Getting the HFA dx assures services, having Asperger's doesn't.
Some schools will do their own educational diagnosis, some require an actual medical diagnosis.

I think that Asperger's is on the autistic spectrum. I describe myself as "autistic" although my diagnosis is Asperger's. Asperger's, HFA, LFA, PDD-NOS all describe a certain presentation of the condition, but they all fall under the umbrella of autism.

Neurological studies, including brain scans, show that people with Asperger's have the same atypical brain structure that people diagnosed with Autism have. A lot of the time, people with AS have brain structures closer to 'normal' than people with LFA, but autism is a spectrum, and AS brains still show the differences seen in autism.

Asperger's/ HFA overlaps with several personality disorders, including Depersonalization Disorder, Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, Schizophrenia, Borderline PD. So perhaps it could be classified on its own.

However, I personally feel it is a lesser degree of autism. It's a "manner of thinking" that is heavily visual and closed off from neurotypical interpersonal behavior. There is also a strong facet of an inability or poor ability to communicate verbally, and of course, varying degrees of stimming, ranging from severe head banging to twitching one's legs...

Well, that's where we have returned to. My son is still young so we are more familiar with school services. I guess the cutoff age to diagnose is 6. No school services without it. My son is HFA and we were told on the "border".
California's policies vary from school to school. The regional centers (those who provide caseworkers and services) won't take you with AS. Some schools will provide special ed or adaptive equip and some won't. Or they may cut off services they have been providing. I don't believe there is a cutoff date for medical diagnosis, and I have been told it can take years to get one. It took us about 6 months.

I agree with the official classification of Asperger's Syndrome being an Autism Spectrum Disorder. I think it makes perfect sense that Autism is a spectrum starting in the low functioning range of the severely handicapped and ending in the normal range of the slightly eccentric/socially awkward. Asperger's Syndrome is simply a section of the Autistic Spectrum in which affected people are more than slightly eccentic/socially awkward, but much less than severely handicapped. The spectrum of autism has a wide span.

just wait until you son is out of highschool. it gets worse let me tell you. i was in special ed, classes from the 1st grade untill i dropped out. of course i was misdiagnosed with and emotional handycap and a specific learning disabilitys, because according to my VR caseworker; they didn't know about As when i was a kid. bullfuckingshit. thats what i told her/ they knew about it they were just being lazy and were way to overcrowded, so they wanted to pass me to the next grade no matter what. once your son gets out of school they'll just send him to vocational rehabilitation if he doesn't have classic autism you can forget about getting anykind of help with living independent skills or anyof that, because they don't provide services like that to people who are on the autistic spectrum who dont have "classic autism". good luck about the only kind of service you can get with HFA and As, is help finding a job once your out of school.