Can autism be "developed" later in life

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I once saw a documentary on the Discovery Health channel I think) where this couple had like 18 adopted kids with severe special needs and who basicaly would be deemed "unadoptable". There was a little boy who required a feeding tube, an blind African American girl. One of them was a teenager who "went on to develop autism in his teens" I've heard of kids "becoming" autistic around two or after they get the MMR vaccine but their teens. They showed a video of him around three or four, reading cue cards and he supposedly seemed "normal". Can a supposedly "normal" person develop autism as a teenager?

well perhaps in his teens he developed an anxiety problem or such, making the autism really pronounced. A kid with AS shouldn't have trouble reading cards. I am sure the parents would hardly notice him being socially odd when some of the other kids can't even feed themselves.

You may have heard of autism developing after the MMR vaccine was administer, but the unscrupulous researcher (if he deserves to be called that) faked all the results for money. (And single handedly caused the return of the measles to Britain) All of the subjects that he faked the results of had all the problems in the first place, some has autism, some had other problems that he claimed was autism.

Autism is not caused by vaccines of any kind. It was all fake.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_a ... 683671.ece

If you wish for specifics on how the results were twisted, there's this:

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_a ... 683643.ece

I could provide many, many sources and studies that totally debunk the MMR conspiracy, but there's simply too many to list. These will due unless you wish to dispute it.

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Vaccine conspiracy theories aside, the answer is no. A solid no. Nobody can develop autism later in life. You've wither always had it, or never had it. As SirLogiC says, it can become more noticeable in the teen years, but it can't just appear out of the blue. When you go through the diagnosis process for autism later in life, they have to check the records extensively from your entire life. This is because if they can't verify that you had the problems in childhood, then you probably just have an anxiety disorder or something else that developed and looks like autism. Autism has to have been there since early childhood to be diagnosed.

You cannot "develop autism in your teens." Autism is a neurological condition that is genetically present at birth. Yet, too often,
a person is subjected to a mutitude of misdiagnoses before one is "correctly" diagnosed...only the lucky ones get diagnosed as
children.

It seems as though I regressed when I hit school-age, but it could have been just my reaction to the school environment.
There must have been something wrong with me before then, otherwise I would not have been singled out and so badly mistreated in day care.

Puberty is a rough time for most people, I do believe that some of
the worst issues people with aspergers have occur during this time

I think that by definition you wouldnt be able to develop a "pervasive developmental disorder" in your teens, as by definition it affects your childhood development. It was probably just picked up late that the kid was autistic rather than just strange. They say that the teenage years are the worst for aspies anyhow with all the social stuff in school etc......

I really got a lot better in a lot of ways when I hit puberty.
I sorta caught up in terms of developing some semblance..if not of normalcy....of relative social acceptability...I was able to find a niche based on my main special interest..singing......I was able to get my weight under control..I became a vegetarian...I got better at self-care...I developed a unique sense of fashion, whereas when I was younger, I was extremely oblivious about clothes, and would wear the most horrible, tacky and ill-fitting stuff...it was harder for me than most to know when to start wearing a bra and stuff like that.
I finally made it into Gifted/Talented classes...which I don't think i could have managed in school without...Small classes...flexible teachers...interesting work....mostly-tolerant classmates...I went through my hyperactive phase...I joined a band.....
That was what puberty was like for me anyway...I was really behind in a lot of ways, but i tried to sorta "fake" it and/or overcompensate for it in some ways.

It sounds like environmental autism, not really autism but can mimic the symptoms of autism. Have you heard about the girl in the window? She was neglected by her parents and developed autistic symptoms. Through a lot of therapy and support of her foster parents she lost a lot of those symptoms, which is why it's actually not real autism.
That's just my theory anyway.

This is what gets to me so much is that I had absolutely NO signs of AS till I began HS. Its like they all popped out of me on the 2nd day of Year 7.

Nothing, not a thing to say I had AS before that. The psyches that diagnosed me say I have mild AS but then there are people in the autism community who say there is no such thing as "mild" AS so I am buggared if I know what happened to me! Is there anyone else out there that this has happened to also?

Your autistic neurology is present from birth and pre-birth.
However, the autistic or Asperger's traits may become more apparent at different times in the developmental process.


Dr. Stephen Gutstein believes that autistic traits can fluctuate throughout the course of one's life, and static intelligence tendencies can become more fixed and pronounced as time goes on.

For some, the autistic traits are apparent in babyhood and/or infancy.
For milder forms of ASD, it may be the full extent of the AS traits is not evident until the child is exposed to more complex social dynamics outside of the family realm.
This is why it is said that some kids with AS are not "apparently" AS until around 7 or 8 or 9.
They might be deemed eccentric or a bit quirky or unusual before that, but are not so out of synch socially that they require an assessment. This might only become necessary as other peers around them develop more subtle and complex forms of social relating and dynamic exchange and communication. At this time the divergences become marked and more pronounced, and an assessment may be sought or suggested.

And in the good old days....well....you got nothing but raps over the knuckle and berating fro being weird or different.

I can't relate but there is such a thing as mild AS. Many months ago there was a thread about it and I got a bit jealous at how less affected some of the people on here were.
Maybe all the stress of HS just made your symptoms more noticeable or you were misdiagnosed? I lasted barely 11 months in my high school. I was labelled 'a loner' by my teachers. They were all worried about me. They even thought I had been sexually abused. I now hate everything about HS and teenagers, and was glad that I only had 11 months of it. I was homeschooled and finished HS in college.

Technically, you can, and it's called Chronic Schizophrenia [without delusions and hallucinations]. Used to be called Simple Schizophrenia.

It's just like getting hit with the ASD bat in your teens to adult years.

Well, saying there is no such thing as mild AS is like saying there is no such thing as purple. It's a spectrum. I suppose at some point a line needs to be drawn between "AS" and "not AS", which would depend on all kinds of things which are mostly subjective. The criteria (DSM) which states that the characteristics need to have caused significant impairment in functioning are very subjective. I grew up with a mother who is, in many ways, like myself. She is quiet and introverted, and likes to work on her solitary hobbies and activities, so she respected that need in me. If she had been a social butterfly, worrying that I didn't want to go to large birthday parties every weekend, that would have been different. It wasn't until I was nearly an adult that people began to suggest there was something "wrong" with me, because I suddenly found myself surrounded by different expectations, like the expectation that normal people get excited about school dances, or that by the time you are 15, you have some magic ability to organize your life.


Also, a lot of people don't know this, but your brain goes through major changes between puberty and your early to mid twenties. You change because your brain changes. There's some interesting stuff on the internet about that, but I don't have a link, I'm sorry to say.

Caveat: I don't have a clue if I'm on the spectrum or not, in case that affects my credibility for people.

doesn't affect your credibility at all, in my view, or the quality of your posts. I always enjoy reading them.

Possibilities:
--A late diagnosis combined with an unusually high stress level accentuating symptoms.
--Childhood disintegrative disorder. It's very rare, but it is late-onset autism.
--A seizure disorder, head injury, or other kind of brain problem, combined with underlying and undiagnosed mild autism. (In my opinion, this is probably what happened to Evan McCarthy, who was autistic before his severe epilepsy caused a regression.)
--Early-onset schizophrenia.
--Some combination of selective mutism, sensory integration disorder, repetitive movement disorder, and social phobia. These can all be acquired.
--One of the rare cases of autism with loss of skills at puberty. They are rare, but like CDD, many have been documented. In general, you end up with someone who looks like HFA as a child, LFA as a teenager, but who has always had undependable skill levels, seemingly knowing something one day but not the next.

I am quite sure it is either extremely rare or completely impossible to become in your teens. I have not yet seen a documented case of CDD that has its onset in the teen years (almost always it happens before six). Autism itself has a lot to do with how the brain grows, not just the final product as an adult. Whatever mechanism creates the autistic brain (we know the root cause is genetic, but not exactly how those genes express themselves), it seems to happen during brain development, not after age three when the brain has finished most of its development.