How do they know aspergers is autism?

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The people I met with HFA, you can tell they have it, and I am absolutely nothing like them. The two guys I met in person with AS don't resemble HFA at all either. I really don't see them being one in the same, just having some of the behaviors you find in autism.

I don't know what to tell you. When I go to autistic get togethers, it's extremely obvious who has AS and who has HFA. The aspies, especially the women, are the only people you can talk to.

I don't think I've ever read a straight answer as to why aspergers is considered a form of autism. Some of the behaviors resemble autism, and there's sensory issues in some cases, but is that the only reason it's considered a high functioning autistic disorder? Is it just our best guess for now?

People DXed as HFA who were often non verbal in childhood often grow up to be very similar to people with Asperger's.

You can't tell the difference in many cases.

Early childhood autism

Asperger acknowledged that there were many similarities between his syndrome and Kanner's early infantile autism. Nevertheless, he considered they were different because he regarded autism as a psychotic process, and his own syndrome as a stable personality trait. Since neither psychotic process nor personality trait has been defined empirically, little more can be said about whether they can be distinguished from each other.

Van Krevelen (1971) and Wolff & Barlow (1979) agreed with Asperger that his syndrome should be differentiated from autism. They differ in their accounts of the distinguishing features and the impression gained from their papers is that, although there are some differences, the syndromes are more alike than unalike. The variations could be explained on the basis of the severity of the impairments, though the authors quoted above would not agree with this hypothesis. Thus the autistic child, at least when young, is aloof and indifferent to others, whereas the child with Asperger syndrome is passive or makes inappropriate one-sided approaches. The former is mute or has delayed and abnormal speech, whereas the latter learns to speak with good grammar and vocabulary (though he may, when young, reverse pronouns), but the content of his speech is inappropriate for the social context and he has problems with understanding complex meanings. Non-verbal communication is severely impaired in both conditions. In autism, in the early years, there may be no use of gesture to communicate. In Asperger syndrome there tends to be inappropriate use of gesture to accompany speech. In both conditions, monotonous or peculiar vocal intonation is characteristic. The autistic child develops stereotyped, repetitive routines involving objects or people (for example, arranging toys and household objects in specific abstract patterns, or insisting that everyone in a room should cross the right leg over the left), whereas the person with Asperger syndrome becomes immersed in mathematical abstractions, or amassing facts on his special interests. Abnormal responses to sensory input - including indifference, distress and fascination - are characteristic of early childhood autism and form the basis of the theories of perceptual inconstancy put forward by Ornitz & Ritvo (1968) and of over-selectivity of attention suggested by Lovaas et al (1971). These features are associated with greater severity of handicap, and lower mental age. They are not described as typical of Asperger syndrome, and they are rarely seen in older autistic people with intelligence quotients in the normal range.

The one area in which this type of comparison does not seem to apply is in motor development. Typically, autistic children tend to be good at climbing and balancing when young. Those with Asperger syndrome, on the other hand, are notably il1-co-ordinated in posture, gait and gestures. Even this may not be a particularly useful point of differentiation, since children who have typical autism when young tend to become clumsy in movernent and much less attractive and graceful in appearance by the time of adolescence (see DeMyer, 1976, 1979 for a discussion of motor skills in autism and autistic-like conditions).

Bosch (1962) considered that Asperger syndrome and autism were variants of the same condition. This author pointed out that, although Asperger and Van Krevelen (1971) listed features in the early history which they thought distinguished the two conditions, in practice these did not cluster into two groups often enough to justify the differentiation. The child in Appendix No. 6 illustrates this problem (see also Everard 1980).

The answer is we DON'T know Asperger's is the same as HFA. Slowly, some researchers are speaking out against it, which makes me happy. It doesn't matter if the SYMPTOMS are the same. We need to understand how the two differ from a neurological standpoint. The fact that AS doesn't have a speech delay means that there is something very different going on during development. Even if treatment and diagnosis don't differ, as a neuroscientist, I feel that it is crucial to understand these differences in order to properly understand more about the brain and its functioning. The point is that the whole VIQ/PIQ debate and the speech delay have not been resolved, nor has the reason why those with AS tend to be clumsy and uncoordinated, something not usually seen in HFA. And if this hasn't been fully resolved neuroscientifically, it is a huge mistake wanting to remove AS from the diagnostic criteria. Throwing HFA and AS diagnoses in the same group for research is why I believe ASD research is filled with confounds and findings that are often inconclusive and contradictory of one another.