aspergers vs kanners

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i picked up my psych eval from my previous med provider and they dx'ed me with autistic disorder as one of my diagnoses rather than aspergers as previously diagnosed. what exactly is the differance. from what ive understood its just speech delay as a kid. is there any other differances? if thats all id probablly have aspergers rather than kanners because i could talk when i was one year old and even said a couple words before then. however i do seem to be worse at reading facial expressions than most people with aspergers and dont need as much socialization or have nearly as much emotion as most people with aspergers. it was also odd that on the same evaluation it stated that i made excellent eye contact and spoke in complete sentances which most people ive met with kanners autism do not usually do.

There is pretty much no difference. The diagnosis, if recently, might have been influenced by the fact that Asperger's will probably be eradicated as a label in the DSM anyway.

Or maybe they were simply following the criteria correctly-- if you fit the criteria for autistic disorder, you would get that instead of an Asperger's diagnosis-- I don't think it's typically diagnosed this way normally it's done by speech delay or none like you said.

If you learned to talk late, you should be diagnosed with autism/Kanner's. If you learned to talk at the normal age, you should have Asperger's. There is literally no other difference.

Though I started talking late and am diagnosed with Asperger's, so go figure...

i think aspergers would be the correct diagnosis for me then since i started talking early. i heard about them taking aspergers out of the dsm, and that would be stupid because it would cause confusion and the speech delay seperates it from kanner's. if anything they should make more subtypes of aspergers and kanners like they do with adhd and schizophrenia. i also heard they want to take schizoaffective out of the dsm too. taking these things out of the dsm will make these diagnoses even more vague than they already are and then they'll give me a pdd-nos and psychosis-nos diagnosis. if anything the "nos" diagnoses's should be removed and replaced with more subtypes and maybe list associated traits attached to diagnoses's, for example diagnosing someone with something like "aspergers with associated traits of adhd, ocd, and learning disorders" instead of diagnosing them as co-morbid diagnoses when their actually just symptoms of something else. I also think they should add sensory and motor impairments and perhaps also tics to the diagnostic symptoms of autistic specturm disorders because they are commonly present in probablly 85% of people with autistic disorders and it would get rid of giving autistic people an additional diagnosis of something like sensory-motor intregration disorder which is completly unnecessary. They dx'ed me with "neurological developmental disorder" (which i figure is probablly what they were calling pervasive developmental disorder in the 1980's), adhd, and sensory-moter intregration disorder when i was 5 years old. I ended up going to physical therapy for about 5 more years after that, while working on my social skill development went completly ignored by therapists and noone even told me about the "neurological developmental disorder" or adhd diagnosis until i was 22 and i was still in high school and i was refered to a psychiatrist by the school and i got my old evaluations from my mom to give to the psychiatrist and he then diagnosed me with aspergers. I actually didn't ever even know why I was going to physical therapy as a child because my mom didn't want to tell me and I just assumed that it was something all people did. Adding these symptoms to the diagnostic symptoms of autistic spectrum disorders might help working on autistic childrens development incorperate working in all areas of impairment.

I'm curious about this too because my son did not fully communicate until he was 4 but it was clear that he had receptive skills early on. He is diagnosed with Asperger's.

My question is, who is the most likely to have the stronger obsessions? The one with AS, or the one with Kanner's?

I think that is pretty much the difference (talking early or not) but I haven't heard about this eradication of the AS diagnosis... I think it would be better if doctors stopped concentrating on individual conditions (I see the OP has about the same amount of diagnoses as I) and more on the individual symptoms which are causing the problems. I am currently going through yet another round of tests, now to find out if I DO have AS or not (although two people have said yes professionally) and they are also looking into borderline personality disorder, bipolar disorder and also they are looking into my two other diagnoses of Tourette syndrome and OCD. GAWD so annoying! I wouldn't worry about the name change becuase doctors seem to like changing the names of conditions randomly.

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I have HFA, ADHD, OCD & Tourette syndrome. I love animals, especially my bunnies and hamster. I skate in a roller derby team (but I'll try not to bite )

This is from Lorna Wing (the one who defined what AS is, and probably soon to be was. Who ironically, also defined the spectrum itself):

According to that article I seem to be somewhere in between. I have excellent visual-spatial skills (i scored 99th percentile in 2006, and i have the aloof social impairments of kanners, however i didnt have any speech delay as a toddler. I also have the poor motor-cordination, and inapproperiate social interactions of aspergers, but i have horrible grammer in my speech although I can type very good. The things I just mentioned are actually the most noticable autism symptoms I have other than I cant read and express facial expressions or tone of voice well and I have severe alexithymic symptoms.

The whole things is confusing, even if you focus on language delay. My son was diagnosed with atypical autism, but they said it was close to classic autism. AS didn't come up because of his language delay. He was clearly behind his peers BUT he did do two-word utterances at age 2, and three-word statements at 3. But his grammar was off and his pronunciation dodgy at age 4. Sometimes I think he got atypical rather than AS because he wouldn't talk to the evaluators.

I was diagnosed with AS because I had normal language development, albeit quirky language, and normal adaptive skills.

Yeah, it's confusing. Right now, there's very little difference between the two, except that Kanner's is a little broader and allows diagnosis of people with speech delays and developmental delay. Most people currently diagnosed with Asperger's can also be diagnosed with Kanner's. Both Asperger's and Kanner's are too specific, since the majority of autism cases can only be diagnosed as PDD-NOS.

Hopefully, in the future, all this will simply be called "autism spectrum disorder".

If you look at the diagnostic criteria, talking late is not required for an autistic diagnosis. It's possible that some who do the diagnosing do differentiate them that way, but that's not in the diagnostic criteria. And the diagnostic criteria for Asperger's say that if you fit the diagnostic criteria for autism, you get an autism diagnosis rather than Asperger's.

I think, honestly, the difference depends on who's doing the dianosing.

yeah, that's why I said the Kanner's category was broader. it includes people with and without speech delays, while asperger's only allows people without.