A REAL difference between HFA and Asperger's

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I was diagnosed as Aspergers yet in DSMIV, I fit the criteria for BOTH Classic Autism AND Childhood Disintegratove Disorder (because I regressed[lost skills] at age 2 1/2 dramatically). In historical studies, Leo Kanner said in the end of his original 1943 paper that Childhood Disintegrative Disorder, which in his paper is called "dementia infantilis" is characterized by at least 2 years of normal or near normal development and makes it different from Leo Kanner's Classic Autism because Kanner said all of his 11 patients had autism since they were born or were babies. So I by that am more likely considered CDD despite being high functioning high IQ.

Plus they did a study about whether the DSM IV Asperger's Syndrome exsists. According to them, it did not and all of those diagnosed with Aspergers met the criteria for Classic Autism.According to the study, none diagnosed with Aspergers met the DSM-IV criteria for Aspergers

The reason was problems with communication. But Classic Autism also requires an autistic issue to be present before a child's 3rd birthday.So in reality, they would still fit DSM-IV Aspergers because their autistic problems are so mild and high functioning that their autism problems get detected as a problem at a later age (after age 3) since many Apies are not detetcted and diagnosed as Aspergers until they are older children and even as teenagers and adults. If DSM-IV did not recognize Aspergers, some of these kids would of been labled PDD-NOS instead. But in DSM-IV since PDD-NOS is the general ground, the kids diagnosed as Aspergers with no delay would really fit DSM-IV's Aspergers.

I'm very visual and more of a visual learning and my learning style is more HFA than AS and I had a speech delay and echolalia but I also was deaf as a baby. I was never a little professor and my verbal IQ was always low. But my diagnoses was still AS. But I was always sociable as a kid and liked having friends and playing with others. I realize one with autism can be sociable but that doesn't mean they aren't lacking in social skills. I am also not good at drawing and not very good at being creative. I have always found that difficult in school when we were expected to design our own thing as a class assignment rather it was drawing or writer's workshop and then we had a school project where we had to make a something to keep our egg from cracking when it gets thrown off a high place and my mom helped me with it. I also read late (I learned at age 6) and started reading chapter books late at age nine because I was pretty visual and words meant nothing to me. I wasn't a very good reader when I was 6 and 7 but when I was 8 I picked up in it but I didn't understand what I was reading. I needed pictures. I was not smart like a typical aspie and I would score low on IQ because of my communication issue. I could probably meet the autistic criteria from the DSM IV if I wasn't deaf at a very young age and I still had these issues. I did need these pictures like autistic children do for what they need to do and supposed to be doing or what activity they will be doing and as I got older I didn't need them anymore.

I consider myself to have atypical autism, because I don't quite fit the description of Asperger's, and neither do I fit the description of classic autism or Kanner's.

There are measurable brain differences between AS and HFA. However before this was shown in studies, the main difference was considered to be the speech delay in HFA.

I did not have a speech delay as a child. And I read a lot so I developed a large vocabulary. I have high verbal intelligence. I didn't appear to have any speech problems whatsoever, other than being very silent at times. I guess that this was interpreted as purposeful, or part of my personality, and I guess it still is. However, I DO have speech problems and I have a lot of trouble expressing myself verbally.

After my regression at age 2 1/2 I was not speaking and had full fledged autism (or Childhood Disintegrative Disorder in some dictonaries). I did not speak again until I was 5. But at ages 5 and 6, my parents continued speech therapy as I did not speak unless they questioned me and I would question them back. I had no Asperger traits of collecting information and speaking about them in Mr. Spock language. Instead, I liked paying attention closely at walls, drifting into music and movie detail and making my own imaginary prespective off that. Then, when I was 11 years old, I started having purely Asperger traits of collecting alrge amounts of information and my first clear obsessive subject was dinosaurs. Then, it went to yachts, cars, video games, sailing, geography. I would collect information on that and I still know extensively about some of that stuff today, even tough they are not my current obsessions. So when I was an older kid and a teenager, I gained more purely Asperger traits. When I was 11 until I was 19 (10 months ago), I had very childish traits at the same time that seperated me from Aspergers like having imaginary friends and living in an imaginary world at times. Now I have no imaginary friends and I am no longer in an imaginary world.

I never said they weren't "indistinguishable". My claim is that they are the result of the same process: different brain wiring, and thus if they are the result of the same CAUSE they are indeed related.



Um, no, I'll add [sarcasm][joke] or other tags if I'm not 100% serious on this site.



I think you need to actually meet some "classic" autistics before you make that judgement. I've met several that loved being around other people, if said people treat them with the respect they deserve. They do interact with others, just in non-typical ways. As for "having the ability to speak and understand", yes they do have vocal chords, hence the reason they scream when they get sensory overload. But forming words and actually talking, a good amount of them want to be able to talk but their mind gets "congested" with so much sensory input that they can't form words. It's not a CHOICE, it's a legitimate barrier. I've never met, but have seen video of "classic" autistics that can type, but can't speak, and seem to love being able to communicate-- I'm pretty sure it's not an act, I mean who would want to pretend to be autistic? I've also met a "classic" that was exceptional at crossword puzzles and drawing-- it's a stereotype that "classics" are only good at one thing.


I agree "classics" and "aspies" have different needs and abilities but there are also a lot of overlaps, to name a few: both can suffer from sensory overload, both can have mutism, both can have meltdowns, both can fail to understand human interaction, etc. I myself have been diagnosed with Asperger's but I can get so overloaded (generally visual, but sometimes auditory) that I can't speak until the stimulus is gone. By the criteria you're using I don't fit either definition, yet here I am. You're welcome to your opinion, but I can't agree with it based on my experiences.

But I have individual charcateristics as well. For example, a doctor told me that unlike many people with Aspergers and HFA, I actually undertand social cues very well. For example, I know what the metaphor of things like "get lost" means. And I also undertand deep humor that most people with Aspergers and HFA don't get. And the doctor said I express and understand humor well, which kost people with HFA and Aspergers have trouble in.
However, i still have other social troubles like trouble making eye contact and not knowing what to say and communicate myself. I stuble when trying to speak something and I have a disorganized vocabulary.

If they have little or no speech, they are not high functioning.

As for your regression, if you're going off Kanner and Asperger, neither of them would consider you to have their condition.

What we call autism and Asperger syndrome bear little resemblance to the original diagnostic categories proposed by Kanner and Asperger.



Well, that's not a good analogy. Colds and flus are caused by different underlying conditions. In the vast majority of cases of HFA/AS, we have no idea what caused it. But as best we can figure out, the two are not caused by separate things. However you divide the two, you can usually find family members on both sides of the divide, suggesting shared genetic components. And the few identified conditions causing HFA/AS always cause both rather than just one of the other. In fact, there's a lot more evidence to say that LFA and HFA are distinct conditions than to say HFA and AS are.



Just because they weren't detected younger than age 3 doesn't mean they didn't have issues then. I had no language delay, and even if I'd been assessed I wouldn't have been diagnosed until around 6-7 at the earliest. But I did show autistic traits below age 3 - intense interests and sensory processing issues. It's just the social impairment that took awhile to become evident.



Citation? I've never seen any evidence for that.

High functioning means IQ over 70 or 80. It's not determined by speech capability.



I saw a study about it, I forget when...probably a couple of years ago. I didn't save a link to it.

I also read about it, had to do with differences in grey matter and white matter as far as I recall, but I cannot look it up anymore in history of PC, it got hacked lately and I lost all history.

Well I guess my consultant Psychiatrist hedged his bets when he diagnosed me with a bit of mild aspie, a bit of HFA, and possibly a bit of PDD/NOS thrown in too!

I can't remember if he said I was a bit dyspraxic too.

Most people that know me think there is nothing at all wrong with me. Apart from being a total idiot that is and not very likeable at all. I'm quite good natured despite this, but find nastier, mean people have a lot more friends and respect in society. That and the fact that they can't fix computers as well as me. But none of that counts in the real world.

I've got the worst of both worlds - just being seen as a normal idiot is only the half of it.

When it comes down to it, I wouldn't worry about labels too much. This stuff is in its infancy, with many debating that none of this exists at all (despite correlations with things like over sensitivity to light/sound/touch etc.). They believe that we should all be labeled 'village idiot', whether we can fix computers or not. We understand the difficulties we face and we all vary greatly amongst ourselves. All we can do is do what most NT people don't do and recognize our difficulties and respect the differences between them, without getting into 'my disability/disfunction is worse than yours'. Yes, sometimes it is. But sometimes it is very very hard being 'almost normal'. We get diagnosed later, get less support when we do, and typically get shunned by family/friends for being a 'spacker' or whatever other hurtful thing they might think and/or sometimes not say.

It's a battle for anyone and everyone anyway. The NT world is basically a load of people deceiving each other so they can eat the other ones alive. There is deception within deception and double/triple bluffs. Psychopathy is the logical extension of being NT. In fact, I can relate to psychopaths more than NT a lot of the time. So I guess my empathy is good and I can read people and understand deeper emotional/psychological traits. It's just that I'm an idiot!

Sounds like some of those classic autists may actually be aspies given the overarching diagnosis of autism. However, I received the diagnosis of Asperger sydrome in the early 90s when 10 years earlier a shrink misdiagnosed me with PDD-NOS. Now I have met other aspies and I have to say that for me personally, sensory overload really has never prevented me from being able to form words and construct sentences to speak my mind. When I get sensory overload I occasionally clam up but that's due to anxiety(which certainly happens to plenty of non-autistic people too from time to time). Classic autists do indeed have the physical ability to speak and form words but LFAs simply do not use spoken language to communicate even though they understand it. This is a qualitative comparison I'm making her and not a quantitative one.

As for classic autism(lack of verbal communication and no interest in social interaction)and Asperger syndrome, what evidence is there that they have the exact same cause? Different wiring of the brain, yes. But what about specific differences in the wiring of certain regions of the brain......

You keep saying this as though it were true.

I would interested to see that, as well. According to Tony Attwood, Hans Asperger never referred to his subjects as anything but autistic. The term "Asperger's Syndrome" did not exist until 1981, a year after Hans Asperger died.

In the current nomenclature autism is the main umbrella category in which all diagnosis fit, all the other names are merely sub-categories. Let's replace autism with say European. I say that person's European, and you say, no, he/she is French, the French have a unique language and a distinct culture that's different than other Europeans. This is true, but they also have close ties with all other Europeans, some genetic, some cultural, some historical, definitely institutional (EU, NATO, etc.), and definitely geographical (all being in Europe). Therefore I say the French are a sub-category of European. Now let's say that person is half French, half Dutch, what are they? They aren't exactly French and they aren't exactly Dutch but they're still European. When you look at all of the traits shared among people with autism you'll find they don't fit into nice firm organized categories, there is a ton of variance-- enough so that a diagnosis of AS, or HFA, or LFA cannot be firmly established for a large segment of the autistic community. That's why they moved to explaining it as a spectrum.

But let's say we decide to go that route, how many brain scans of people with LFA do you think will be exactly the same? The answer is 0, there will always be variance unless the person is a direct clone of another person. All we can say for certain is that an autistic persons brain map looks very different than an allistic person's brain map-- hence the reason they're all autistic. I'm not denying that there are differences, I'm saying those differences can't be categorized because they vary widely on an individual basis, enough so that the sub categories lose meaning.

You really have no idea what you're talking about. If you'd like to inform yourself then I suggest you start by at least reading the criteria for Autistic Disorder (DSM-IV) and Childhood Autism (ICD-10). If you think those are too recent and believe that you're going by the original defintions then I suggest you actually read Kanner's original paper because your ideas don't match the original definitions, either.

If I am not mistaking we have people even on this very site diagnosed with classic autism who do actually still desire social interaction, and are pained by the difficulties in that area that autism causes. And how do you know that is the reason children with classic autism wander....are you certain its never due to sensory overload, getting curious about something and wandering off to check it out neglecting to keep track of where they are due to hyper-focus?

Also not all are non-verbal, and you are confusing autistic savants with classic autists, not all diagnosed with classic autism are savants....It seems like you're trying to speak for people with classic autism, without even bothering to consider their perspectives and you have not mentioned any specific distinguishable differences. I think whether or not we want social interaction/relationships more depends on the person than whether is aspergers or classic autism you where diagnosed with.