Is there a difference between HFA and AS?

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Here's the DSM on the differences of communication between Asperger's and autism (as well as a bit on selective mutism to show another phrase pointing to "verbose"):

This is an old news item but it highlights some of the political issues in differentiating between AS/HFA. I imagine this will only increase as DSMV approaches.

http://www.uq.edu.au/news/?article=5816

From article -

anbuend, it's actually the triad of functioning [in society], my mistake sorry; I get my triads mixed up. They're the big "three" in the medical circles for how they define the outcomes of individuals with Asperger's/autism.

I agree that the aforementioned three aren't the only areas that individuals will experience difficulty in.

beau99, of course people with AS/AD have friends; when they're taken as separate and complete entities (AS or AD), most don't.

Okay, to answer someone's question (sorry to not remember your name). According to Lorna Wing (although there may not be a lot of science behind this), there are four main social interaction styles among autistic people:

Aloof (actively avoiding social contact, or appearing not to even notice social contact when it's initiated).
Passive (allowing social contact if someone else initiates it, but not initiating).
Active-but-odd (initiating social contact, but doing it in a way that most people wouldn't do it).
Formal (dealing with social contact in a manner that seems too formal for casual occasions, but staying in that formal mode all the time).

One of the main problems is, for instance, that many autistic people categorized as aloof, have been able to say that they want social contact, they're just not able to send the signals of wanting or noticing it. I can remember asking someone at one point why nobody interacted with me, and getting a startled (and startling!) reply of "But you don't want to interact with anyone, and you don't notice when people do interact with you!" or something like that. (The person was actually very stern with me about how much I was supposedly avoiding contact, which was not my intention at all.)

Personally, if I had to categorize myself along those lines, while I've certainly had times where I'd be categorized as what people would call aloof, as well as what people would call "active-but-odd" (i.e., running up to people and saying nonsense in several languages, running up to people and reciting facts, etc)., my main social interaction style would be considered passive, as in I have real trouble initiating, but once someone else initiates, I will go along with it.

Of course, that's true for me not only for social interaction, but for all things requiring action at all, and they've found that, while autism and AS and LFA/HFA and any other classification within the autistic "spectrum" did not seem to correlate to the kind of movement disorder I have, social passivity did, making them think that social passivity is sort of one of the subtle early elements of a movement disorder that becomes really obvious much later and makes it hard for a person to initiate all movement. In my case, I have to have environmental things set up so that I will be able to do assorted required movements, and also set up so that I don't do movements that are not required. And I also have trouble initiating thought, memory, etc., on my own as well. Something always has to trigger them, and when comparing deliberate vs. triggered on just about any aspect of my life, triggered is always far superior to deliberate. (And deliberate movement has been shown on me to be stressful enough to show up on a measure of galvanic skin response -- most people's movement doesn't show up on it at all even when moving vigorously, whereas automatic movement (such as rocking) or triggered movement (such as keyboarding) does not show up at all on mine. So wiggling my toe is more physiologically stressful to me than touch-typing, since the presence of a keyboard triggers the ability to type.)

Also I know some autistic people who don't like the designation "active but odd" because it implies there's some sort of disparity between "active" and "odd", and prefer "actively odd"

Online, my passive conversational style can make me seem somewhat argumentative at times, because often it's seeing something I consider inaccurate that triggers me into responding. Although seeing something I agree with and want to elaborate on can trigger a response too.

Also, sometimes I wonder a couple things. Whether "aloof" (when it means, actively avoiding contact on purpose) and "active but odd" (meaning actively seeking out contact) are actually the same thing but with different preferences (both of them the opposite of passive), or the same thing but with different overload thresholds (that way explaining why, for instance my brother went from "aloof" to "active but odd" seamlessly throughout different points of his development, but never being "passive").

And whether some kinds of "aloof" are actually forms of "passive" where instead of another person's approach triggering interaction, another person's approach triggers avoidance or expressions of overload or other such things (such as when I was small and screamed when other children tried to interact with me).

And whether some kinds of aloof are other forms of passive where a person is so passive that it takes far more than an approach to trigger a kind of interaction that most people would recognize. (Such as some people who may only be triggered into action by being touched, or other things besides mere social approaches. This is similar to other times I've been considered "aloof", and still easy to come by if I get exhausted enough.)

And whether scientists have bothered to look at this (although from what I've heard, many scientists don't take the aloof/active-but-odd/passive/etc system too seriously, since it wasn't arrived at by science as much as observation and subjective categorization).

Also whether scientists have bothered to look into social passivity to see if it correlates to other things being triggerable by aspects of the environment other than social aspects. (Since that is how I experience things, and many other people I know who are classifiable as "passive" see things similarly.)

I'm also curious why it is that sometimes a person's presence triggers my ability to do things (including interact), and why other times a person's presence makes me less able to do those things.

Er... enough thread-hijacking, I guess.

Although be careful with PDD-NOS, it doesn't always mean what most people call 'high functioning'. I have known people who were diagnosed with PDD-NOS because they were so unable to do most things (whether because of cerebral palsy or something else), that they could not do the things that people are required to do in order to get an autism diagnosis. (I also am not sure the HF/LF dichotomy works that well, but that's a whole 'nother subject.)

The req for a PDD-NOS dx is displaying autistic behaviors and not meeting the criteria for another PDD. This lack of meeting can come from many things, like inability to take the tests ( as stated above), severity of behaviors not meeting criteria guidelines, or late onset.

More on the last one. Forms of autism, like CDD and Rett's, are late onset by nature. What I mean by late onset above is that the onset is later then CDD/RTT criteria allow ( 7+ typically although there have been some cases of CDD in children as old as 9)

Okay, this post was kinda off topic but just thought i'd give some info.