Is CDD related to Autism?

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I personally don't believe it is related at all, and I believe it just happens to bare some similarities to severe LFA after it sets in. Autistic people tend to improve as they get older and learn more, not cognitively regress, and the causes are believed to be completely different. What do you think?

I don't believe they are related either, just like autism and Rett syndrome. I don't know enough about neurology to give specific reasons, though.

I'm pretty sure that both CDD and Rett syndrome have a different origin than regular autism; but they so clearly include autism as part of their constellation of symptoms that there has to be some connection.

I think it must be a little like Down syndrome versus general, non-syndrome-related intellectual disability. Down syndrome has a known genetic cause, and a set of symptoms that includes intellectual disability; but it's also possible (much more common in fact) to have just the intellectual disability that's not related to any known syndrome--you know, the people with ID that don't have distinctive features or related physical problems like Down syndrome would give them.

So you can have autism as part of an overall syndrome, like Rett syndrome or Heller syndrome; or you can have it by itself, like how some people have intellectual disabilities without any syndrome related to them.

I think it's a bit premature to remove Rett's from the spectrum. Yes, it's got a known genetic cause; but we know that autism probably has many, many different combinations of genes that can cause it--and Rett syndrome is probably only one of many. It's just the most obvious, that's all; like Down syndrome and ID.

I'm pretty sure that CDD is a syndrome of its own, like Rett syndrome is. But I'm also hesitant to say that CDD isn't on the autism spectrum; because even if we did discover a specific cause, the effect would still include all the traits of autism.

I dont think either thats belongs to the autism spectrum. I do like to get in touch with other parents with a child with cdd though if interested to share our experiences for instance.

What the hell is a CDD?

Childhood disintegrative disorder

Personally, I think CDD is probably more closely related to schizophrenia than autism. Judging from the book When Autism Strikes, which is a collection of parent accounts of CDD, many kids with CDD have hallucinations and delusions during their regression. (Before they've lost too much speech to report on these symptoms, that is.)

Regression is also a feature of schizophrenia, though much less severe than in CDD. (People with schizophrenia often have declines in self-care and executive functions that last even if psychotic symptoms disappear, and a subset of people with schizophrenia also show a decline in IQ scores.)