Would you say Asperger's/HFA is a minority on the spectrum?

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I recall these numbers:

AS = 1/4
AD (LFA/HFA, with HFA being the rarest of the lot) = 1/4
PDD-NOS = 2/4

They seemed to think it was accurate.

The best numbers I know are like this, roughly--
PDD-NOS: 60%
Classic autism: 25%
Asperger's: 10%
Rett's, CDD, other syndromic autism: 5%

But the numbers are changing. We're diagnosing more people with mild impairments, at the same time as we're diagnosing more people with intellectual disability. We probably won't know what the final proportions are for a good couple of decades.

well when the general public thinks of autism they think of people with classic or low-functioning autism. thats why I don't like telling people I have autism. I prefer to say I have Aspergers.



and as for personal attacks, yah save the insults for the thread post something rude to the person above you in random discussions forums.

Interesting.
HFA was my dx for quite sometime until my psychiatrist changed it to ADD with autistic symptoms.

I just know having HFA had the disacvantage that most psychiatrists not specialized in autism think there is either LFA or Asperger's and are confused when you tell them that your officiall diagnosis is "HFA" and because HFA is not listed seperatly in the ICD-10, ppl with HFA are grouped under the "classic autism" what most psychiatrist think is identical to LFA.

Eventhough I thought it is correct, I was totally anoyed by that.

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Also we still have to wait and see if the ICD-11 will change in the same way as the DSM-5 did and then we'll just be left with ASD anyway.

Yeah, I really prefer it that way. I'm in between labels, been labeled one way or the other depending on superficial presentation, and I know that if you get labeled "LFA", then your skills get ignored; if you're labeled "HFA" then your deficits get ignored. Either way is not going to let you live up to your potential. I really prefer the single diagnosis so that they have to look at us as individuals.

I think that looking at people as individuals is not neurotypical. Most people seem to always look at other people as members of groups, even people they are very close to.

In some ways, the process of diagnosis in the absence of a reliable test or metric is just a question of an expert assigning a person to a group.... I understand exactly what you mean and I wish it could be that way, but I don't expect people to look at me as anything but a collection of group labels unless they have gotten to know me well.

It usually doesn't take people long to realize that their stereotypes are not appropriate for me, but they really don't want to expend the energy to know other people as individuals, so they don't make any attempt to know me less superficially.

HFA was about 1/4 of the AD population.

Though you could probably add them easily enough to the AS one.

Technically, PDD-NOS would contain the rarest and "unusual" types, being as it was a basket for all autistic people who didn't meet AS or AD (lots of variations here).

i don't see many people like me.

i saw one boy that walked exactly like me at the mall once.

More like majority. I've met more Aspies and high-functioning individuals than I have low-functioning. There's also Klinefelter Syndrome and stuff like that, but it's 1 in 20000 (and getting smaller as individuals tend to be unable to fertilize). PDD-NOS and the "other category" but that kinda falls under HFA.

Ppl with Klinefelter-Syndrome have a higher propability of having ASD, but not necesserely.



PDD-NOS just means that you don't fit in any of the other diagnostic categories for autism, but doesn't say if they are HFA or not. In fact it's a very heterogene group.
Here is a study about that topic:

"Children with PDD-NOS could be placed into one of three subgroups: a high-functioning group (24%) who resembled AS but had transient language delay or mild cognitive impairment; a subgroup resembling autism (24%) but who had late age of onset or too severe cognitive delays or were too young to potentially meet the full diagnostic criteria for autism; and a group (52%) not fulfilling the criteria for autism because of fewer stereotyped and repetitive behaviors."

Specifying PDD-NOS: a comparison of PDD-NOS, Asperger syndrome, and autism.

This is a good clear up. I don't know much about PDD-NOS, thanks!

3.4 per 1,000 is very low. I'm guessing they're mostly getting the LFA end there, hence the high rate of cognitive issues.

[http://ajp.psychiatryonline.org/article.aspx?articleID=116570&RelatedWidgetArticles=true]This study[/url] found a far higher rate (2.64%, or 26.4 out of 1,000) and the majority of those were high functioning. If you look at the way the studies ascertained the autistic kids
both studied selected kids likely to be autistic, then assessed them to confirm the diagnosis. However, they differ in how they chose kids to assess. The first study reports the following:



In other words, they only assessed autism in kids suspected to have it. In contrast, the second study screened a representative sample of the population of children, and assessed kids who scored high on the screening test whether or not anyone suspected autism:



So, when you look at kids already suspected or diagnosed as autistic, most are low-functioning. But if you count in the kids who are autistic but no one suspected it beforehand, most autistics are high functioning.