Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion "Child Genius and Autism Connected"

I barely skimmed this and it looked sort of problematic but I thought it might be of interest:

http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/252637.php

The author shouldn't be writing on such topics, but it's still interesting. Thank you.

Hmmm.... Why should she not be writing on such topics??

Lack of domain knowledge and journalistic expertise.

The articles on this service are often bad.

I wonder (ok, I don't really) why these findings on 8! subjects leads to the conclusion that they are somehow "overcoming" autism as a medical condition via their gifts rather than a potential discussion regarding how we define autism and how we are creating a medical condition for seeing and engaging with the world differently. There is no crtique here of our definitions of autism or our tools for identifying it, which I think would be more interesting.

Plus the questionable research design makes the whole thing useless anyway, imo.

It would probably be worth reading the actual research article (which I haven't).

A sample size of eight is extremely small.

Thanks to this thread, I now know that there is no reason to read the article because it's apparently worthless.

Thanks, everyone!

Here's the original news release from OSU:
http://researchnews.osu.edu/archive/chldprod.htm
At least the original didn't swap Genius for Prodigy.

The symptom overlaps between various spectrum type disorders and gifted has bubbled up here many times. The prodigies + working memory isn't new data.

Overall, I'm with you, LNEsMom, questioning how some of these diagnostics are done would be interesting.

Those are the questions it brought up for me, MoT, in my skim--I thought it was interesting. I was also interested in the strong WM performance of these kids across the board, since we see a lot of average-ish WM kids here. I've wondered how typical that is or if that's more common in kids whose parents find their way to this particular board. I don't have a WM score on either of my kids, but I suspect they both would do very well on the subtest. However, my oldest also exhibits some traits that can look spectrumish, including but not limited to very unusual feats of memory. This is seeming somewhat less obvious as she ages, but it's still there. For instance, the other day I said something about how she was student of the week early on last school year. She interrupted me: "I was SOtW the fifth week. Bob was SOtW the first week, Suzie was SOtW the second week, Amrit was SOtW the third week..." She went on like this for some time. I don't know if she could have done the whole year, but she seemed to know the order for at least three months or so (I cut her off after a point!) She also remembers what day of the week her birthday was on for various ages.

My AS child has low average WM scores (WMI 86 on the WISC). He also has wicked long term memory (147 for story recall delayed on the WJ-III, IIRC and tons of those anecdotes where he remembers details I, who also have a very, very long memory, plain forgot).

1) These (working memory and long term memory) are two completely different things. Working memory is really the processor's internal buffers and is not even that related to short term memory.

2) I haven't read the article yet but my sample of 1 argues that there is not a 1:1 relationship between WM and ASD.

i haven't read article YET but plan to. tmro.

in meantime, i can say that i have always believed that it is my DS6 extremely high intelligience & his need to learn, that has "pulled him out" of autism...
at the same time, his HFA keeps him from truly standing out as the smart kiddo he is!
i have read numerous reports on 2E identified gifted kids on spectrum falling in the cracks for this same reason. it is like somehow they even each other out? sort of...

*he is not a prodigy and he hasn't been tested, i have no idea what his WM is.

i look forward to reading this article.

wow.
i couldn't wait, and barely started and NOT impressed by what i am reading. Right off they got this wrong::

"The fact that half of the families and three of the prodigies themselves were affected by autism is surprising because autism occurs in only one of 120 individuals, said Joanne Ruthsatz, lead author of the study and assistant professor of psychology at Ohio State University’s Mansfield campus."

**it was all over the news this past year--- it is 1 IN 80**

that might be 1/80 boys.
but still, point is more kids are being dx with ASD...

yikes i read both links and feel they were both poorly written or maybe just not "enough substance" (i'm not a writer)

also FYI just about every person i meet shows some traits of autism, myself included!!!

however, it is having MANY as opposed to one or two traits, and meeting the criteria, that lands a child with an autism dx.

ok good night

Yeah, you're right--WM and long-term are not the same, and I conflated them.

It's important for everyone to remember that neither of these links were written by the study authors. I read a ton of these press releases and brief clips every day; in some cases, I then read the actual journal article. In MANY cases, the press release/news piece misrepresents the actual journal article. (And I don't have a stats background, so I probably miss a lot of errors.)

I was about to reply that usually around here (and the Eides' blog) low WM seems to be associated with EF issues/ADD, and since there is high comorbidity of ASD and ADD...

But maybe not: http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.23...83&uid=63&uid=3739256&sid=21101432668077
(old research though).

I read another article, I can't remember if it was linked on here, or just another site, but it had to do with studying the rate of autism among the children of so-called "geeks". People with jobs that highly value systematizing. They began a fairly small study and found that the rate of autism among children of engineers was significantly higher than the general population. I think it was by Simon Baron-Cohen. If I can find the link again I'll post it.

Here it is! http://www.scientificamerican.com/a...les-more-likely-to-have-kids-with-autism

DS4 already has a PDD-NOS diagnosis from couple months ago and there will be more testing done shortly to check for Asperger's rather than the PDD-NOS and DS2.7 is awaiting a developmental screening for autism soon. While with the older one I do believe the mild autism diagnosis is probably correct (though we have seen HUGE decrease in symptoms in the last 3 weeks due to dietary changes), with the younger one who presents MORE autistic than the older one, I just still can't believe he would be autistic. I will be fine with whatever diagnosis (or lack of) we receive but the younger one is the one who does some incredible things and I am pretty sure his IQ will be way up there somewhere (not a prodigy but high). I am just afraid that we will get an autism diagnosis for a child that does NOT have it ... a child that simply prefers to run his own world the way he likes it and doesn't like people telling him that it's the "wrong" way based on "normalcy" ... he is NOT a normal child so why does majority of people expect him to do the things most children his age do? So what if he's not interested in playing with Play-Doh and at at 2.5 years old prefers to play crossword puzzle on his brother's Leappad? lol

The younger one is in Early Intervention receiving therapies based on the EI evaluations (placing him way behind in development when he was tested at 25 months) ... but fortunately he has therapists who see him for who he is and are not trying to break him. And they do agree that the early childhood screening results are way off for him (where he may be more than 1 full year behind in some area while 4-5 years ahead in other areas). so even the therapists are puzzled by him and can't wait for us to get some official testing done because as they say they have "never worked with a child like him"

Anyways, I know I am just rambling but I always wonder how many children with presumed autism are little Einsteins that fell through the cracks?

Yeah--there's a theory (I'm not sure how much credence it still has) that part of the rise in ASDs has to do with the increasing value of ASD-ish skills (think IT) to society. Thus, these people have income and cluster together and marry and reproduce. I read a long article in Wired about it once.

However, it seems to me that we keep finding out more potential causes for ASD. Age of father is a big new one, right?

In my own family, we absolutely see unusual, prodigy-like skills combined with ASD-type personalities. AFAIK, only one person was ever diagnosed. One person should have been, according to all who knew him, but he was also a literal mathematical genius who would be well known to anyone with a serious mathematical background.

Funny thing, I went to the Autism-Spectrum Quotient quiz at Wired that was used for that study:
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/9.12/aqtest.html

Did my own thumbnail analysis of the content and came up with these categories of questions versus personality:
(50 total questions)
3 Distinctly ASD
6 Related to creative (scored for negative)
4 Detail-oriented
13 Empathy related (scored for negative)
15 Fairly classical gifted traits
9 Introverted
(YAMV)

It's a lot like the MMPI: you can draw nothing realistic from middle high score tendencies, but can only really look at the scores that cross into the diagnostic range.

I don't think I've seen that particular quiz before. I scored very low (7). I took it "as" my DD, scoring everything as high as possible on questions that would give her ASD "points," (So I inflated a bit) and got a 27. That's completely typical of every such (obviously nonprofessional) test/quiz I've ever taken for her. Gray area.

The specialist in women and girls with Aspergers that we have been consulting actually uses that test as a pre-screener in the paperwork she sends out prior to a first appointment (NOT a diagnostic tool). She obviously thinks it's somewhat useful.

I scored 32 ... I certainly displayed a lot of aspergerish traits when I was younger and still do ... now, the question is ... was it because I had/have asperger's ... or because I was gifted? lol

Interesting, MumofThree. I noticed that they didn't have anything sensory on that one, which seemed like a big omission to me. (My own score seems too low to me; I definitely have more than a touch of SPD.)

DD doesn't check any of the boxes for ASD regarding social stuff and pretend play on that one. She's even the other direction. However, detail-oriented? Blunt? Absolutely.

Can I remember details, strings of numbers? Nope.

Sometimes I don't realize that the forest has any trees.

Ultramarina - I was thinking about this after I posted and I am pretty sure that the screener the psychologist used was 95% identical, but I do think it did not have at least one of these questions and may have had one or two extras. I will try to find time to compare the two. But I wonder if she is using a slightly updated/modified version?

Oh, this just makes me laugh and sigh:

"A further research paper indicated that the questionnaire could be used for screening in clinical practice, with scores less than 26 indicating that a diagnosis of Asperger syndrome can effectively be ruled out."

(Wikipedia)

Again, I scored DD at...27. (I intentionally scored "up" a bit, answering "strongly agree" or "strongly disagree" in some instances when it was more like like "agree"--they don't have that option on this one).

Looks like this may be the child version: http://autismresearchcenter.com/docs/papers/2008_Auyeung_etal_ChildAQ.pdf


ETA: this link is better:

http://www.autismresearchcentre.com/arc_tests

I get a 58 for DD on the child version, interestingly--significantly higher than average for typically developing girls, but well below the diagnostic cut-off of 76.

I scored 6, my kiddo scored a 32.

My favorite of his comments while taking the survey: so when they say you can play pretend with kids when you were little ... does that mean like the time when I yelled, "Warp core meltdown!" in Kindergarten when we were playing pizza makers?. I was playing pretend, but I don't think they got it.