Anyone know anything about AS and underdeveloped reflexes?

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Hi,
I have a 7yr old AS son who just had a vision assessment at a Learning and Vision Centre. They picked up that he had some issues with reflexes (arm/leg co-ordination etc.), and recommend this area be assessed (also has issues with his eye movement). Am just wondering if anyone can offer any advice? From looking on the INPP website it seems that symptoms of "retained primitive reflexes and underdevelopment of key postural reflexes" are very similar to AS symptoms ie. hypersensivity, hyposensitivity, motor co-ordination, emotional and social maturity, anxiety etc. It raises questions for me such as is my child's AS one-and-the-same as this developmental delay? And then, if they assess him for delayed development of reflexes and are able to do therapy to help, will this help his overall AS symptoms? Any information would be greatly appreciated as I have only hit on all this information today (and my husband mentioned that I should check it out as it might be "quackery"! !).

The thing about the 'primitive reflexes' stuff, is that neurological variance and brain damage can cause primitive reflexes to come back because the things inhibiting them aren't there.

A good example is that people with movement disorders and Alzheimer's sometimes have a grasp reflex. And, for instance, a person with catatonia and related movement disorders (in which symptoms often wax and wane) may only have the grasp reflex during the time that they are experiencing the most severe symptoms, not when they have milder or no symptoms. (And some forms of catatonia seem to be related to autism, and even potentially related to the dyspraxia some autistic people experience, so this isn't irrelevant.)

Obviously, that means that trying to train your body (through something like patterning, which I just provided a skeptical link about) to 'go through all the stages again' isn't going to help here. Even when infantile reflexes, such as a grasp reflex, are present.

Because the problem isn't that the person didn't go through a bunch of stages or whatever. The problem is that something is messing up the inhibition of the reflex. And that can happen after the person has already inhibited it, and even the person can go back and forth between it being inhibited and not. The lack of inhibition of infantile or fetal reflexes is a symptom, not a cause, and treating it as if it's a cause won't improve anything else.

It's very equivalent to trying to treat someone's near-sightedness by making them go over all the developmental stages of visual perception again, without glasses, and expecting their vision to improve because "infants can't understand what they see either". It makes absolutely no sense from a medical standpoint.

There's a kid with autism at the school I'm interning at who "suckles" rather than "sucks" when he is drinking. He still has the infant feeding pattern (he's ten years old).

Hi Anbuend,
You obviously know quite a bit about this area - thanks for the explanation - very helpful. I have read through the report on the patterning link you gave me as well. So, does that mean that I should just leave the whole thing alone and there is nothing that can be done to help? Is the therapy that this centre is offering likely to be patterning therapy, or is there any chance it is something different? Should I go back to them and ask? Am just trying to work out what is the best for my son's development . . . and with an assessment costing $200 and then "therapy" on top of that, it is worth doing my research. From my point of view, I don't think that the reflex thing is affecting him greatly - he runs and plays sport a little awkwardly, but is still co-ordinated. My priorities with his AS are more in helping with his development of social skills and speech. If an assessment and therapy would give him less AS issues to contend with, I'd go for it, but from what you're saying, it doesn't sound like it would. Is that right?

I have no idea. It may be a thing that gets better with age; I never developed coordination skills until later in my childhood (riding a bike for example). However, I don't see a connection between my own AS and reflex deficit; my brain processes information at incredible speeds (picture everything in slow motion) so I'm at a loss to explain any possible connections.

To those of you who've posted . . . thanks for your feedback. Guess it seems there's not a whole bunch of people out there who know much about this - me included!!

Dyspraxia and related motor-control issues are often comorbid with AS, although of course they can exist alone as a singular diagnosis too.

It's interesting that you mentioned eye-movement, as this was something that was picked up on with me when I was being assessed for Dyspraxia. In my case, the problem seemed to be that I have no 'dominant' eye, which was causing visual tracking issues.

The good news is that coordination and motor issues can often improve drastically over time. Those of us who struggle greatly with spacial awareness and limb coordination may never quite get to grips with absolute coordination in an instinctive sense, but we can learn from daily repetition to coordinate ourselves in most environments.

Myself, I have an AS diagnoses with comorbid features of Dyspraxia and ADD. For me, my coordination and motor problems manifest as being clumsy, exaggerating my movements (for example, flailing when I sneeze), lack of accurate spacial awareness abilities (how far away something is, whether it will fit, etc), difficulty with balance, difficulty with fine motor tasks (buttons, taps, bottle lids etc), overall muscle-tone weakness (floppiness).

If your son's difficulties around motor involvement seem to be a predominant issue, it may well be worth having him screened for a Dyspraxic disorder. Early intervention can really help, as children are much better equipped to learn these kinds of skills as part of their natural development.

And finally, it is very possible that in helping him with his motor/visual problems, his AS 'symptoms' may also improve. This is not a guarantee, because at this stage it seems that you're not sure which is the predominant condition (the chicken and egg dilemma). But it is very true that one disorder can mimic the other.

For example: a person with AS may seem to have motor skills problems that are in fact mainly caused by AS-related sensory issues. Once the sensory issues are address, they may appear to improve overall coordination. And equally, a person with a Dyspraxic disorder may present with AS 'symptoms' such as shying away from social situations, avoiding eye-contact etc because of their intense focus on maintaining a sense of spacial equilibrium.

In summary: I think it would be prudent to have your son screened for a Dyspraxic disorder, but also to bear in mind that certain aspects of AS can manifest in that way too.