Difference between ASD and PDD

Post Reply New Topic

What is the difference between Autism Spectrum Disorder and Pervasive Developmental Disorder? You get a diagnosis for ASD or PDD instead of specific disorder, such as autism or aspergers?

They go for PDD when they are confused. "You are weird but I don't understand the heck".
Sometimes I read that PDD-NOS is "milder" than AS but I'd rather say it's more "atypical". Because if you have all the AS criteria at the milder level you are AS, not PDD-NOS.

"Pervasive Developmental Disorder" is the big category under which "Asperger's" falls. Another name for "pervasive developmental disorder" is "autism spectrum disorder". "Autism" can refer either to pervasive developmental disorders in general or to Autistic Disorder in particular.

So, Asperger's can be called a PDD or an autism spectrum disorder or a kind of autism.

PDD-NOS, also known as "atypical autism", is a disorder that is a pervasive developmental disorder but does not fit into any specific category of PDD. So, if you categorize the PDDs, you end up with several subtypes. PDD-NOS is the label given to cases that are obviously autism but don't fit into specific subtypes. It means nothing more than "miscellaneous autism" and so you cannot make any predictions about someone's specific traits given that they have a diagnosis of PDD-NOS (other than the fact that they are autistic).

Currently, PDD-NOS makes up the majority of autism diagnoses, meaning that the average case is actually "atypical". This makes it pretty obvious that the autism spectrum is not easily divided into subtypes, and probably should not be; variations occur at the individual level rather than dividing the spectrum into groups, so it makes more sense to define the entire autism spectrum as a whole, without trying to subdivide it, and making note of the wide diversity in expression of specific cases of autism.