New Definition of Autism Drops Asperger, PDD-NOS Distinctions

By Nirvi Shah from On Special Education

Changes proposed to the diagnostic guide used by psychologists, including substantial changes to the definition of autism, are all but final.

Late last week, the American Psychiatric Association's Board of Trustees approved the latest version of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the DSM-5, which will be available when the manual is published in the spring.

The change to the definition of autism entails recasting the disability, which currently includes a range of labels including Asperger syndrome, autism, and pervasive developmental disorder-not otherwise specified, into the single autism spectrum disorder.

Although there have been fears that the consolidation could mean that some people now diagnosed with a form of autism may lose their diagnoses and any services and aid their condition may yield, it could have the opposite effect, one autism expert said.

Read more HERE.

Autism Diagnosis: Who has what, and why?

By John Elder Robison from My Life With Asperger's - Psychology Today

Are Asperger's, Autism, and PDD-NOS all the same?

I listened to a very interesting talk today from Catherine Lord, one of the creators of the ADOS test. ADOS is kind of the "gold standard" diagnostic test for autism, and she's a well-respected figure in the world of autism diagnosis, so I jumped at the chance to hear her thoughts on where we're headed in that regard.

In the autism world, people who are given a diagnosis are told they have one of three conditions: Autism, Asperger's, or PDD-NOS. The big question is, who should be diagnosed with what? Is there a coherent sense of classification, or is it merely arbitrary or random? She reviewed the diagnostic data for several thousand spectrumites in an effort to determine what caused a person to end up in one of those three categories.

To her surprise, after analyzing the data, she found the principal predictive factor had nothing to do with the individual. Looking at records from a number of good university hospitals, she found places who called almost everyone Asperger, and other places where everyone was PDD-NOS. There was no discernible pattern of variation between individuals; they seemed to simply get different diagnoses in different places.

Read complete article HERE.