food for thought:


Albert Einstein College of Medicine

Autistic children can outgrow difficulty understanding visual cues and sounds

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2013-08/aeco-acc082813.php

*perhaps this is why some children with autism appear to "recover" or "overcome" their autism? because their biggest, perhaps only issues; were the socio/emotional ie communication (pragmatics)? idk. just thinking out loud.

Makes you wonder if for some kids all those therapies they are being pushed into are really necessary, seeing that if you let nature take it's course, you might get there as well? If only would we know ahead of time how our children will turn out!

We are taking the laid back, minimum therapy approach and seeing better results that way than when DS3 was in all the therapies they wanted him in. Our biggest concern is the future, but I just feel in my gut that he will be fine.

Thanks for posting, cc6!

It does make me wonder how they identified the kids as having ASD in the first place. But it is good to hear, especially because DD has been suggested to have ASD even though her issues are almost exclusively the social ones.

ETA: I feel the same way, Mk13--I think our DD will be fine, too, although sometimes I wish she would make progress more quickly.

we do have an official diagnosis and DS3 a lot of times seems non-functional at all but it's very environment based. He has this natural understanding of how things are supposed to be so without anyone teaching him or showing him, he just automatically picks up on the self-care things like getting something to eat, putting dirty dishes away, cleaning up, etc. (except for potty training because he freaks at the sight of the toilet / potty). Unlike DS5 who loves to shove garbage under his bed! lol His true enemy is social situations and expectations of others. As long as he's not pushed into anything, he does great. Given how smart he is, he might not be able to work interacting with people too much even when he grows up but he still should be fine finding a job that will suit him and have a pretty normal life. I just look at him and he gives me this calm vibe that all will be fine

It doesn't look like good science to me. In their press releases (which are all over the Internet, btw) they do not make clear how they chose the population of people they studied, what interventions those people received, or how they were educated.

The findings appear to amount to "wow! people learn and grow!" to which I would say, well, yes, they do. Brains change for many reasons, such as exposure to new situations and education.

My favorite piece of writing on the subject of "outgrowing autism" is John Elder Robison's, here : http://jerobison.blogspot.com/2013/01/can-we-outgrow-autism.html

I don't much buy the idea of "recovery" from autism. Most science and experience points to the idea that the neurological differences are persistent; but of course a person learns and adapts to their environment over time.

Yes, many people with autism will be fine; many will struggle to be fine in situations that are hard for them; and there are many different versions of fine. I don't think we have to imagine that everyone will be magically cured in adolescence (press release: ""In adolescence, something amazing happens and the kids with ASD begin to perform like the typically developing kids," said Dr. Foxe") to believe that they will find their own kind of fine.

JMO.
DeeDee

What I wonder-- and I wonder this about a lot of other conditions which are not necessarily well-understood from an etiological/mechanistic standpoint...

maybe a subpopulation that shares underlying etiology DOES "recover/change" in some predictable ways during maturation.

It certainly happens in some other diagnoses which are about function rather than particular quantitative measurement of mechanism. Asthma, for example.

Why is it that SOME asthmatic children "grow out of" that asthma, while others worsen significantly during adolescence?


Most researchers in that field acknowledge that what we currently think of as "Asthma" is likely to actually be a collection of underlying causes which all result in narrowing of the airways ('asthma'). It's a symptom masquerading as a diagnosis, in other words.


I have done very little serious digging in the serious research literature surrounding ASD's, but more in that of ADD/ADHD, and the latter certainly bears the same hallmarks.

So it seems entirely plausible that some children "outgrow" whatever it was that was causing the symptoms of ASD. Too bad not enough is known for clinicians to accurately predict who they are yet.

All parents have now with these kinds of symptom-based umbrella diagnoses is "wait and see what happens during adolescence." We're doing it now with DD's asthma.

Actually it's quite common for people to "recover" from autism. These are people who were misdiagnosed and didn't actually have autism in the first place.

50 years ago "Diabetes" was your diagnosis. Now, it's much more nuanced-- there's an understanding that while "high blood glucose" might be the hallmark, it's not sufficient in terms of predicting best practices and good management to leave it at that.

Type II means something very different than Type I.

Think about all of the learning challenges which used to be termed "dyslexia" for another great example.

We see the ASD diagnosis as a set of family resemblances: nobody has all the traits, but most of the diagnosed people have several of them.


If the "quirk" or delay impairs the child's functioning across various environments (not just school), though, it is to be taken seriously IMO. We have seen instances of under-diagnosis as well as over-diagnosis. It can be quite difficult to find a doc willing to diagnose a highly verbal, bright child with an ASD, even if functioning is obviously severely impaired and many of the classic symptoms are there. And without the dx, no help is available. (Even with the dx, sometimes no help is available.)


I would argue for more differentiation, but not to narrow the pool or throw out diagnosable people; rather to make it clearer who needs what help to succeed and grow.

I agree that it's the Wild West out there in many respects.

DeeDee

Interesting article. DS (now 6) has had the term "autism" or "asperger's" thrown around by various people ever since he was a preschooler. He did have some interesting quirks/delays but I believe that they can mainly be attributed to uneven brain maturation and/or developmental coordination disorder/dyspraxia. There is an overlap between autism and many other disorders (like dyspraxia). Perhaps the kids in the study should never have been diagnosed with autism, but auditory processing disorder instead. And maybe auditory processing disorder improves with age. I also think that many psychs/"professionals" are slapping the autism label around too freely. When I took DS recently to a neuropsych he said that if I had taken him elsewhere he could have easily had an Asperger's label thrown on him because of some of his mannerisms (like flapping his hands and his odd voice prosody) but DS did just fine on a test of reading others emotions and the Asperger's rating scale for parents/teacher.
I found the book "The Einstein Syndrome" fascinating in respect to a small percentage of late talkers outgrowing their delays. Often these kids were misdiagnosed with autism and then grew out of the autism by the time they entered elem school (because they never had autism in the first place). DS was never actually diagnosed with anything but "delays" but easily could have been misdiagnosed and fits the profile in that book almost perfectly.

My son was diagnosed with ASperger's last year - both a medical diagnosis and a school "finding" that qualified him for an IEP. This came after years of teachers and others hinting about this and that, though the school wouldn�t have initiated anything. N is a well-behaved, smart kid, and pretty easy to ignore. What helped us put the pieces together was a discussion with a psychologist. She asked us a lot of questions that made no sense to me at the time, and suggested we have him evaluated. The types of questions they asked us during the very thorough evaluation hit on so many aspects of his development that we�d never realized were related, such as not fully potty training until age 7, trouble eating, bowel issues, toe walking (so bad he eventually needed casting and then bracing) his trouble standing in line (he�d lean on people), inability to safely cross the street, etc. He also has the social difficulties and perseveration on limited topics associated with AS, but they weren�t so extreme (or disruptive) that they�d send obvious alarms to teachers and others. What teachers saw was an introverted, very smart kid who didn�t cause trouble, had a (single) good friend, and needed help �coming out of his shell and participating in class�. Oh, and he couldn�t really be in gifted programming because he wasn�t �organized� enough (read: socially competent). Oh, and why is he so darn spacey sometimes and why does he talk either too quietly or too loudly and lean on people? Stuff like that �never a major concern, just vague complaints and confusion about my son�s behavior. Occasionally he�d have a social misunderstanding that would seriously piss someone off, and he�d be mystified as to what he�d done wrong. I�m sure that to some of the experts questioning the diagnosis of �quirky smart kids�, they�d probably call my son one of the misdiagnosed ones. When considering diagnosis, though, I think it�s important to consider first and foremost whether the child is happy and functioning well in his environment. That�s not what we are doing when we ask whether a kid has AS or ASD because he flaps his hands, and it�s also not what we do when we only look at one environment with limited data about even that. My son�s teacher never knew, for example, that my child ate almost nothing in his loud, smelly cafeteria because of sensory-induced nausea. She didn�t know about the 2 hours of frantic stimming he did at home because he held it together at school. She didn�t pick up on the fact that he has no idea what day of the week it is, and that he can�t tell me what happened at school, and often seems not to remember. She didn�t understand that he was terribly confused by her sarcasm �that he could not understand when he said, �Really? That�s a good way to earn the class party!� she meant the opposite. This was not a child who was truly functioning well, at home or at school. Now, 8 months later, he�s made huge strides. He�s eating at school, he�s much more responsive socially, he stims and tantrums less, and he�s much happier. All that came with the label, with hard work, and with access to services that only come with the label.
Now, I get to hear people question the diagnosis � his new teacher claiming, �she doesn�t see it�, and relatives saying,� but he�s doing so much better, he can�t have AS�. It�s enough to make me want to scream. Maybe AS just isn�t the end of the world, you know? He might lose his label someday because he got some good help. If that happens, he will not have been �misdiagnosed� but brought up to a level of functioning to where his atypical neurology will no longer be such a liability.

Tuli, I'm glad your DS is doing well. The "invisible disability" problem is a challenge, to be sure-- but it sounds like he's learning what he needs.

DeeDee