Asperger's syndrome vs. High-functioning autism

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The impairment in HFA is often quite mild, sometimes they are able to cope with life than somebody who has been dx'ed with Asperger's.
As far as I am concerned, they are either the same condition, or maybe autism effecting slightly different areas of the brain. Not all docs agree with the speech impairmen before 3 as the defining factor..
Under that system, I have HFA rather than Asperger's. However, I mainly show Asperger traits now. I had speech, but lost it for awhile at 18 months. I regained it around three (about the time I can remember things for the first time. Nothing before..). I do have one other trait of HFA according to one author, I have always accepted frienships if the other person approached me (or if someone introduced me in the case of all my female friendships..)first. I never set out to make a friend on my own.

Sincerely,
Matthew

It might be possible to have both because I have been diagnosed with both. That is if they are not one and the same thing mind you. Half the time i can get along fine with large crowds and such other times I cannot it is weird. Originally at first the diagnostics were HFA as a child due to not being able to talk until I was 4 years old. I was somewhat able to talk at 3 but only by mimicing what other people said to me. If my mom asked me if I wanted a cookie I would ask her if she wanted a cookie. I was able to sing before I could talk as well very odd indeed.

I have HFA and i have speaking problems so i think my diagnosis was right.

The way that I think of it is that there is a spectrum of development of communication skills, verbal and non-verbal, in early childhood. Some autistic children develop these basic communication skills like responding to your name or being able to tell others of your needs (hungry, thirsty, bathroom, hurt, sick, etc) or being able to talk about your favorite topic earlier than others do, starting within the same age range as NT children, but not developing the typical pattern of communication and socialization. These children would be diagnosed with AS, while children who started developing these skills with a significant delay compared to NT children would be diagnosed with HFA. But I don't think that there is a fundamental difference between AS and HFA.

An HFA child who has low communication skills can appear socially aloof, e.g. not being able to respond to name, while an AS child with more advanced communication skills can appear active but odd, e.g. talking about favorite topic to anyone and on and on and on.

IMO, children who fit the criteria for AD should be diagnosed with AD, not AS.

I have moderate autism. I have high fucntioning autism also becase my IQ is with in noraml leavels. high functiongin autism just means clasic autism with a IQ with in normal leavels. high functiong autism inlcudes peopel with a IQ with in normal ranges all over the difernt types of autism. it means peopel with asperger with a Iq with in normal ranges and also clasic autism people with a IQ with in normal leavels. I have been wondering a lot about hich functionign autism. My mum says its just a way of tellign a person that this person may have autism but they are still smart.

The more people on the spectrum I encounter, the more convinced I am that they're interchangeable. The fact that nobody can seem to agree on a distinction just reinforces that.

Sometimes the difference is just a difference in diagnosis patterns among different areas.

I think that one aspect of the communication abilities spectrum is the instinct for communication, or lack thereof. I am mostly passive now, after being aloof for most of my childhood, and part of my former aloofness was the lack of an instinct for communication, even in response to direct overtures of others. Since I had no natural instinct for communication, the idea of communicating through speech or gesture occurred to me very infrequently, and when someone asked me a direct question like "do you want pancakes", there was no answering through verbal or non-verbal means, because there was no they ask you answer communication instinct in my brain to drive the communication behavior. When someone called my name, and I didn't appear to notice that I had heard anything, it was because I didn't recognize the sound of my name as something that I was supposed to respond to, no they call you respond communication instinct. Same with gestures that people made at me. So what if they point at something for me to look at? I saw the physical movements of their arm, hand, and finger, and I looked at and followed these physical movements to the tip of their finger and not beyond, so I didn't look at the thing that they pointed at. In this context, it is hard for me to figure out whether I had the abilities that were not displayed due to lack of instinct or lack of instinct plus lack of abilities, but I do think that lack of instinct played a huge role in non-communication and aloofness. I started learning communication in the 8-10 year old range, but I am sure that I could have learned it earlier and spoken on my own and used gestures earlier, if I had been eggsplicitly taught what communication was through a combination of pictures and words, and if I had a prompting system, like a sign that someone held up to remind me that this is a time to communicate at the same time that they asked me a question or called me by name. The way that I learned communication was through learning a foreign language from children's books where you read the words out loud, and there is a picture to go along with each sentence, and you do repetitive drills from these books until you can speak the foreign language on your own. Also, it helped that a lot of the subject matter in these books and drills was communication itself, like people asking questions and other people answering questions or people greeting each other in foreign language. For some autistic children, receptive language and reading are less severely affected than eggspressive language, e.g. autistic child being able to read before speak, so teaching a child with low communication skills a first language like you would teach a normal child a foreign language might be effective for earlier development of communication skills. I don't know how my development would have gone if I had not learned a foreign language starting around age eight. I feel like this was eggstremely important in my development.

The guy who diagnosed me said that there has been discussion of merging the diagnosis for High Functioning Autism with Asperger's

He said there wasn't enough differentiation between the two, and then said it usually revolved around language development in early childhood - like others in this thread have mentioned

He said that people who had more difficulty with social functioning often got tossed in the HFA pile quicker than someone who functions reasonably well socially

It's just like A*(B+C) and AB+AC. Same difference.