![]() The same kid with the same characteristics with less educated parents ends up as PDD-NOS. So upper-middle class parents got kids with Asperger’s. “There was also a social class factor in a couple of sites. “Asperger’s diagnosis in the 12 sites was predicted by who saw you,” she says, a troubling result. Lord conducted a study across multiple sites, with thousands of subjects, looking at the diagnostic accuracy of the DSM-IV. “But the first meeting they had of that committee they presented the evidence, and it’s just so strong, that you can’t make these distinctions” between Asperger’s and PDD-NOS and autism. ![]() “At first I wondered if the APA would back down and the committee would back down on making the change,” he says. In 2012 Robert Hendren, DO, the director of child and adolescent psychiatry at the University of California, San Francisco, said he was sad to see Asperger’s go. “That was not part of the intention and there is no evidence that that is true. The intention of the new criteria is to include everybody who has a carefully diagnosed ASD,” not exclude the majority of them. “It just feels like we can move beyond it. “We didn’t start out criticizing DSM-IV,” she says. From another parent: “These ‘experts’ need to take a step back and look at whose life they are about to change!” Many also worry that removing the Asperger’s diagnosis will seriously impact the sense of identity of some in the autism community even if does not result in reduced services.Ĭatherine Lord, PhD, a member of the task force that revised the diagnosis and director of Weill Cornell Medical College/ NY Presbyterian Hospital Institute for Brain Development, says the intent was not to undo the old manual. Pure and simple,” quipped another commenter. “As a parent of a child who is diagnosed with high functioning autism the possibility of losing his designation overwhelms me,” one parent wrote in the Times comments section. ![]() The diagnosis is the basis for important treatment like applied behavioral analysis and school services. This uncertainty-the real sense that investigators are figuring out the new diagnosis as they go-does not sit well with some members of the very passionate community of parents of children with Asperger’s and adult Aspies themselves. Many experts have said the revisions are not at all intended to kick people off the spectrum, but rather fine-tune the diagnosis so it is more useful and representative of data gathered over the past 20 years. Others argue that any fall off in diagnosis should be very modest, or perhaps diagnoses might even increase under the DSM-5 criteria. They also reduce the number of symptoms within each category while increasing the number required for diagnosis, effectively limiting the “menu” and, to critics, making the diagnosis more restrictive. The new criteria collapsed what were three separate categories of behaviors into two: persistent deficits in social communication and social interaction, and restricted, repetitive patterns of behavior. The criteria for an autism diagnosis also changed. When the DSM-5 was released in 2013, Asperger’s and PDD-NOS were eliminated as separate conditions that children could be diagnosed with.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |