Aspergers Or Autistic Behavior With Brain Damage?

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Is it possible to be diagnosed with something like Aspergers when in fact it's something related to brain trauma? If there is brain damage that is causing the issues.....is it still Aspergers or Autism or is it simply just brain damage?

Well, it's possible to be MISdiagnosed at least. I'm no expert in neurology, but autism as far as I know concerns structures in various specific sections of the brain, so brain damage cannot truly make you autistic.

yes,have seen a programme about people with various brain injuries before in a UK rehab centre and the ones who had frontal lobe damage were very aspie and ADHD like if remember correctly.
it doesnt take much to damage this part as well because there are some sharp ridges inside the skull at the front and when a person has a minor car acident and hits their head off the steering wheel for example or off something else hard,this can actualy damage the frontal lobe.

however have also got to think about age-if someone had a brain injury at any time after toddler age,it shoud be obvious its not a ASD.

Hmm. That brings me to another point. Is it possible to diagnose someone with Aspergers/Autism with a brain scan? Like would they be able to pick it up on an MRI? Would it be obvious to a trained professional? Do diagnoses for Autism involve any kind of scans?

Yea, I remember reading some article that said there are visible differences on the MRI scans.
I wanna add, though, that MRI scans are prone to interpretation, and a lot of confirmation bias is often involved...

I have heard of people doing QEEG (quantitative EEG) scans to confirm diagnoses of ASD, but usually these people are involved in neurofeedback therapy. The one that I read about claimed that there are several different patterns of brain activity common among people on the spectrum, not just one distinctive pattern.

Of course, all of this may be one of those "on average" things - they might not be able to diagnose, just confirm that someone's brain patterns are unusual and statistically somewhat similar to a sample of people with ASD (with varying degrees of similarity).

I have also heard of a person diagnosed with autism who had suffered prenatal brain damage (attempted abortion) to which, so I gather, their autistic behaviour was attributed. Of course, I/we don't know how autistic they might have been before that prenatal damage ... Apparently the brain damage had affected parts of the brain also implicated in ASD, although I cannot remember the details now. In any event, I would think that this is a very unusual case - I have only ever heard of the one instance of this.

Aspergers is autism, and having either doesn't make one immune to brain damage...so one can have autism and brain damage, and some symptoms of brain damage might overlap with some autism symptoms at least from an outside perspective.

I doubt any brain damage would look at all like a textbook case of AS/Autism, would they get the improved long term memory, sensory issues, narrow and repeitive intrests, thinking in pictures, etc. the list goes on and on that meny and most of us tend to have in addition to the social issues. It just appears to me that autism and actual brain damage would appear very different with brain damage being much more isolated in its effects since the autistic brain is suppost to be completely different in meny ways and in meny places, not just an NT brain with one slightly deformed/damaged part part.

The diagnostic criteria requires quite a diverse list of symptoms that I think would prevent someone from being diagnosed AS/autism if all they did was damage the frontial region of their brain, providing the diagnostic professional is doing more then watching for simple social defects.

My theory is.. brain damage is complete loss of the use of a part of your brain. Autism is a malfunction of some part of either your brain, or some other system that is used by your brain. The result of both are a lessening in brain function but Asperger's/Autism actually enhances other parts of your brain such as sensory issues or patterns. The social part of your brain is the disorder which is to us chaos, we like order and peace.

Just a quick run out of my head.

I might as well just come out and say it.

The reason I brought up this topic was because I was concerned that I may be barking up the wrong tree while trying to figure out how to get myself diagnosed.

I was told by my sister that when I was a baby that she took me out in a stroller by herself. She was just a child of probably around 7 years old at the time. There was supposedly some flap or something in the back of the stroller and I fell out of it right onto the concrete, back of the head first, very hard. She felt guilty all these years about it, and especially since she saw that I grew up to be not so "normal" I guess it bothered her and she confessed it to me a few years ago.

My mom also told me a story about when I was a child some crazy neighborhood kid came by and wacked me on the head as hard as he could with a hockey stick for no reason and she always believed that it did permanent damage.

When I was in college I went for a battery of tests because of my math disability. The psychologist who administered it said I showed signs of slight brain damage. Didn't know how he could tell though, it was all pretty much IQ tests.

I was basically trying to ascertain if I should go more the medical route and try to see if my life long issues stem from some possible brain damage or keep on with the autism route or pursue both avenues. Trying to piece myself together kind of gets more daunting for me as I think about it.

Brain damage is worth exploring especially if you can give clear examples of the kind of trauma you experienced. It should be fairly easy to test for this. They may still decide to diagnose ASD, but any physical damage needs checking for, IMHO.

My mom says that I was a perfectly normal and healthy baby until I had my vaccines. After that I started to have a bunch of food allergies and autistic tendencies. After that my mom put me on a gluten and casein free diet and she gave me a bunch of supplements. I'm not on any diet right now, but I still take supplements. I'm a lot better than I was when I was younger and I have outgrown a lot of my allergies. One thing that helped get rid of some of my symptoms was getting in touch with my intuitive side. This has helped with figuring out social situations. I still have social awkwardness, sensory problems and obsessions to deal with. Once in a while when I'm with the right people I can function like an NT. I actually get energized by interacting with certain people so I can put more energy into appearing normal and the conversation itself. It's weird because most people drain my energy a lot. It's like I have an NT girl trapped inside me begging to come out.

Brain damage can cause autistic symptoms but it is rare for the brain damage to go unnoticed in an assessment - this is part of why a history is taken because the autism has to be present from early childhood, not acquired. When my son was diagnosed just over 10 years ago a brain scan was considered to rule out other factors but the consultant decided the family history was too clear to bother.

If you did suffer brain damage as a baby it may be responsible for your brain developing differently or for part of your brain to be malfunctioning so that ASC symptoms appear but there is unlikely to be proof even on an MRI at this point in your life unless the damage was pretty severe or specific. In this case you would be looked at as ASC because the pattern of your development started very young.

While there are differences in the brains of ASC people that can be seen in an MRI scan these are not yet properly analysed or confirmed and therefore are not able to be used for diagnostic purposes so it would not yet be possible to compare an ASC brain with a brain damaged brain unless the brain damage is clear and focused in areas that are not connected with ASCs. Progress is being made in this area but it will be a while yet before the skills and understanding are good enough to analyse a brain on this level.


At this point in your life it is probably immaterial what caused the symptoms, your brain is not going to change back now it has developed in the way it has. However, I'm assuming you are concerned that it may be genetic - if it is it is likely that there are symptoms or traits in other members of your family (in ours the traits are obvious for several generations on both sides) but even if this is not the case you may still have the genetic markers as there is not always a familial history.

The traits are there in other family members. Mainly my mom. Other family members have mental issues like depression and bi-polar, so mental illnesses in general are there. That's for sure. My father is pretty stupid in most things except business and math. We are complete opposites.

looks like your big sister probably didn't cause your autism then