AS vs. HFA

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I'm sure this topic has been beaten half to death, but can someone give me the short and easy version of the difference between AS and HFA? I find comparisons useful. Thanks in advance.

From the wikipedia article:
"AS is distinguished from the other ASDs by having no general delay in language or cognitive development. Although not mentioned in standard diagnostic criteria, language peculiarities and motor clumsiness are frequently reported."

If clumsiness and a lack of delay in speech push you into the Aspie category, then they pegged me correctly.

I have read/been told also that while with AS your may have social impairments, but still interact/function on some level, whereas HFA's are not interested in social interaction and do not initiate or engage...

thoughts are welcome, I am definitely not a Dr.

Ive always thought that AS was merely a flavor of HFA, not a distinction from it.

I was at a Centre for Autism Workshop today, as we are going through the motions of securing support for our daughter and they did an overview of the Umbrella...

Autism Spectrum Disorders were:

Autism (as we are all aware, I wont spell this one out)

Asperger's (which they considered fairly high functioning form of the Spectrum)

Pervasive Development Disorder-Not Otherwise Specified (which was said to show a significant number of Autistic Traits, but not enough for a clear dx and did not fit into any other category)

Childhood Disintegrative Disorder (which was said to happen quite early on, in infancy/reaching toddler and went from fully functioning to complete loss of skills overnight and is very uncommon)

&

Rett's Disorder (which was said to affect girls almost exclusively and was characterized by deceleration of head growth, small hands/feet and most notably the repetitive hand wringing/mouthing and the other autistic-like impairments)

So, as you can see, no HFA in there, but there were many parents in the room with a HFA diagnosed child ...

HFAis more obvious. Poeple with HFA seem waaay more autistic.

Actually, HFA classifies a level of kanner autism.

AS is treated as a different deal entirely, and some say it isn't even autism. Still, if you look at the quirks and some traits in autism, they overlap almost 100% with AS. The hypo/hyper sensitivity/perception/attention, interests, difference in abilities/development. ALL THERE!

AS people just tend to be smarter(HFA blurs that distinction), tend to have broader interests, be more communicative, more wanting to fit in, and tend to meet or beat all the early benchmarks. Of course, some doctors disagree on some of that which blurs the distinction even more. From the little I have seen and heard, I might have considered some of the HFA diagnosed to be AS and vice versa.

So it COULD maybe be considered a type of HFA. But AS at least TRIES to be more specific and probably has less of a stigma. If GOOD people keep coming out, maybe the falacious bad press will be overcome, and maybe even remove some of the existing stigma.

AS has various official definitions, HFA has no official definition. Officially, AS has no speech delay, and HFA probably should (since speech delay is expected in any diagnosis of "autistic disorder," whatever functionality label is attached to it). In practice, it doesn't seem to matter whether you started talking at 18 months or 40, by the time the people concerned are 12 years old the differences have usually evened out. In some cases, insurance or other programs will cover one but not the other, so a doctor may give whichever diagnosis will get the benefits.

In other words, there's usually no difference.

Research studies on those diagnosed with aspergers found that only a tiny % actually met the criteria for Aspergers, but almost all met the criteria for autism in itself.
Research showed that those with and without language delays were all at the same level by the age of around 5 and that they shared all the same issues and traits otherwise.
Lorna Wing, who suggested the term 'Aspergers' has said herself that there is no difference between AS and HFA.

Which is incorrect: Asperger's was added to the DSM because there was many people who were clearly "autistic" but were unable to meet the criteria for autistic disorder, and hence, they didn't recieve a diagnosis. Those with AD cannot meet the criteria for AS because of point D.

The criteria.

You don't really need much to meet the criteria for AS; compare it to AD.

I think you might be mistaken, because under DSM-III-R, it was easier to be diagnosed as autistic, most aspies would qualify. There was also the catchall category of PDD-NOS for those who didn't. My understanding is that they added AS to DSM-IV because the discrepency between DSM's version of reality, and ICD's, was causing problems. One study would refer to its subjects as having AS, while another study would say that the same type of subjects were high functioning autistics, or had PDD-NOS, and it was screwing up research in a big way. So DSM-IV copied ICD's criteria almost completely, solving the problem.

As an example, what would you think of a kid who,
1.) preferred playing alone
2.) didn't want to make friends, and/or had a hard time doing so
3.) stimmed sometimes
4.) obsessed over a few favorite subjects
5.) had a hard time with social conversation and small talk
6.) was bothered by changes in routine or environment
7.) was a little quirky in either their verbal or non-verbal communication
8.) was more interested in parts of objects, or details of objects, than most kids
9.) started talking when they were less than 2 years old
10.) was definitely of above average intelligence

Under DSM-III-R, that kid would be an autistic if they were acting that way by age 5 or 6, and PDD-NOS if nobody noticed anything unusual about them until later. When DSM-IV came out, APA had to rewrite the autism criteria to specify delayed onset of speech, because otherwise there would have been many people who could have been diagnosed as both autistic and aspie. So if you meet a lot of aspies, you'll find that many of those diagnosed between 1987 and 1994 will have been labelled PDD-NOS or HFA, because those were the categories DSM then allowed.

I got it from here.

I got it from 'Learning and behaviour problems in Asperger Syndrome' , edited by Margot Prior.
A pretty academic text, backed up by journal articles and official research.

That's my issue exactly. I can say that the criteria are quite crappy, because I'd not be autistic if they were correct.

Differences between HFA and AS know of supposed to be:

First symptoms noticeable:

Kanner: at 10 to 12 months
Asperger: from age 3 on

Language:

Kanner: in half of the cases there is no language development, otherwise delay, echolalia and wrong use of pronouns in the beginning
Asperger: early and fast development of a sophisticated and grammatically correct language, pedantic, problems in the understanding of metaphors

Intelligence:

Kanner: part mental retardation, part normal intelligence
Asperger: normal to high intelligence

Motor skills:

Kanner: no noticeable delay or problems that are connected to autism
Asperger: clumsy, bad coordination, other problems with motor skills

I don't think they got it quite right. You see, I had a normal speech development, but still have some problems with speech, had mild echolalia, have no problems with my motor skills and have a normal intelligence. First differences noticeable at age one.

I got it from these places.

Here are the DSM criteria for autism, as they have changed over time
http://www.unstrange.com/dsm1.html

Doctors will diagnose either AS or HFA based on what gets the benefits, in practice they're the same thing
http://www.sacramentoasis.com/docs/8-22-03/as_&_hfa.pdf

The difference between those with speech delay and without tends to even out
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entre ... ds=9932239
http://journals.cambridge.org/action/di ... &aid=67705
After age 8 it evens out pretty quickly
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entre ... d_RVDocSum

There isn't a lot of difference between those diagnosed AS and HFA, and neither group consistently scores "better"
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entre ... t=Citation
http://www.springerlink.com/content/h72h83uv6601117h/
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entre ... d_RVDocSum
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entre ... d_RVDocSum
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entre ... d_RVDocSum

They are similar enough that some think we might as well get rid of the AS category and just call everyone HFA
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entre ... d_RVDocSum
http://apt.rcpsych.org/cgi/content/full/7/4/310

I also relied on some papers and books which aren't available online, but there's enough agreement on this subject that you might have a book which verifies what I've said. Any book by Tony Attwood, for example.