• RedFrank24@lemmy.world
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    12 hours ago

    If autism isn’t a single condition, why do we lump everyone who’s autistic into the same bucket? You’ve got the people that like trains and struggle with social cues and are sensitive to sound, and the people who broke their carer’s arm because their DVD boxset of Dexter’s Lab had a disc in the wrong place, and yes both are autistic, but it’s unhelpful because when someone says they’re autistic, you have no idea what that means.

    I know there’s levels depending on how much care you need, but nobody’s going “I’m level 1 autistic” in daily conversation. It’s not like cancer where you can say “I have cancer” or “My dad died of cancer” and you can then say “It was prostate cancer”, because everyone knows what that means.

    • PattyMcB@lemmy.world
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      14 minutes ago

      What about the different STAGES of cancer?

      It used to be a binary “you have cancer or you don’t”

      We’ve learned more and adjusted the spectrum of cancer severity. Why not the severity of autism (I know it’s not progressive, but it is a spectrum!)

    • Zink@programming.dev
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      9 hours ago

      the people that like trains and struggle with social cues and are sensitive to sound

      Well there goes the last shred of doubt I had that I’m high masking AuDHD.

      It’s not new information, and it’s simple stereotypical stuff, but something about the way you phrased it made it hit different.

      My kid is exactly like me, so learning how to deal with my issues is doubly valuable.

    • DupaCycki@lemmy.world
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      9 hours ago

      If autism isn’t a single condition, why do we lump everyone who’s autistic into the same bucket?

      Why do we talk about the autism spectrum like it’s a disease (or a bunch of diseases)? The only problem with autistic people is that they live in a society that is made for non-autistic people and it actively punishes them for being different. Kind of like with LGBT people, though I’d say a lot worse in this case. There’s nothing stopping people in the spectrum from functioning similarly or better than ‘regular’ people, other than the aforementioned society.

      • PattyMcB@lemmy.world
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        11 minutes ago

        I’m with you… it won’t kill them and it’s not progressive. It’s not caused by a pathogen. It’s not a disease like polio or measles.

        If a parent would rather have their child die, or no child at all, rather than an autistic child, they shouldn’t have children at all.

    • floofloof@lemmy.caOP
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      11 hours ago

      The only reason is that more is known about cancers than about the physiological basis of different psychological conditions. Psychology often has to work at the level of grouping symptoms because it’s difficult and takes a long time to discover any neurological and/or genetic causes behind them.

    • Lemminary@lemmy.world
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      12 hours ago

      If autism isn’t a single condition, why do we lump everyone who’s autistic into the same bucket?

      What categories could they use from the start to differentiate subconditions to avoid this? Experts couldn’t say if it was one disease or many, but they could tell they’re all closely related.

      Investigating health is hard and only hindsight is 20/20.

      • RedFrank24@lemmy.world
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        10 hours ago

        Asperger’s used to be a categorisation, but they got rid of it because 1. The guy who came up with it was a Nazi and used it as a means of segregating those he didn’t intend to murder from those he did, and 2. the border between Autistic and Aspergers was pretty vague and whether you got the diagnosis was dependent on the culture of the clinic doing the diagnosing and not any objective criteria.

        I dunno, it feels (obviously irrationally) a little bit insulting that there isn’t a categorisation, because by lumping everyone who previously had Asperger’s in with Autism, it doesn’t matter how well you mask, as soon as you mention you’re autistic, everyone thinks you’re one wrong word away from having a meltdown. Nobody sees levels, they see Autism, and what was formerly known as Asperger’s, where the latter are a bit weird, and the former are in need of serious care.

  • Konala Koala@lemmy.world
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    1 day ago

    In other words, “Scientists Conclude Both Trump & RFK Jr. Are Utter A**holes For Believing Autism Is Caused By Tylenol, And You Should Be Voting For Democrats Instead”

  • SocialMediaRefugee@lemmy.world
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    1 day ago

    It is likely like cancer, a cluster of conditions that resemble each other in the end. Every time I hear someone talk about “a cure for cancer” I say cancer is like car accidents. You could find a car upside down on the side of the road but there could be many causes for it, drunk driving, asleep at the wheel, mechanical failure, hit and run, etc.

  • DarkFuture@lemmy.world
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    1 day ago

    But that’s not what politicians with absolutely no scientific or medical credentials are telling me.

    • floofloof@lemmy.caOP
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      1 day ago

      Sometimes it’s worth having new studies that add confirmation and detail to conclusions people have already reached. This article does seem to be reporting on new research.

  • Baggie@lemmy.zip
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    1 day ago

    Been saying this for years, feels vindicating. I’m ADD and I’ve been wondering about the possibility of autism, every time I try to look into the symptoms it seems wildly varied, poorly defined and vastly misunderstood. At least with ADHD/ADD you can blame the blood ghosts and do a cocaine about it.

    • Starstarz@lemmy.world
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      1 day ago

      Technically, we do a meth about it! Cocaine does almost nothing for me since I’ve received a doctor-ordered double dose of meth daily since my diagnosis at 17. Damn the blood ghosts for cockblocking all the potential cocaine connections I’ve missed out on!

      • ayyy@sh.itjust.works
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        1 day ago

        The only thing “technically meth” about Ritalin is that it has the word “methyl” in it. I know you are making a lighthearted joke but it’s still really harmful because a majority of the population still literally believe that the doctor wants to give their kid meth and then withhold critical treatment that people need.

        • monotremata@lemmy.ca
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          Ritalin isn’t methamphetamine, but Desoxyn is, and that’s also used for ADHD.

          • ayyy@sh.itjust.works
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            1 day ago

            It is extremely, extremely, extremely rare for someone to be prescribed Desoxyn in the modern age. Nobody you know with ADHD is taking that.

  • Em Adespoton@lemmy.ca
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    2 days ago

    Scientists concluded this in the 1990s, and then had to produce yet another study to unequivocally state it again after every time someone claimed to have found the “cause”.

    This is part of the reason it was re-named ASD in the first place; it describes a set of atypical neurological development symptoms, not an identifiable state of being. Kind of like “cancer” describes an atypical cellular reproductive state, not a pathogen attacking your cells. Both can be caused by many different factors or combination of factors.

    Of course, with ASD, it doesn’t even mean there’s anything particularly wrong most of the time; just atypical, resulting in a person whose thoughts are weighted differently than historically typical, with less interpretation of social cues and a greater ability to focus.

      • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        1 day ago

        Yeah but we’re not allowed to talk about how that 85% has been prescribed stuff that doesn’t help them, very often has negative, deleterious, harmful mental and physical sideeffects, oh and also often cause dependency/addiction.

        Because then when you look at it that way, that would mean basically all currently active, prescribing pscyhiatrists would be open to malpractice lawsuits, and/or drugmakers would be open to gigantic class action lawsuits.

        You know, like with opioid pain killers?

        But uh nope, nope, that can’t be allowed to be considered, so … just don’t talk about it.

        • Zak@lemmy.world
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          Doctors are generally not subject to malpractice suits for engaging in what was believed to be the best practice at the time. That’s how it should be, because that’s how science works.

          Knowing that antidepressants don’t work for most people presents a difficult problem though. There is no test to determine whether they will work other than trying them for months. Never trying them would be unethical because they can be life saving and life changing for those who respond. Using them indiscriminately is also unethical because they have side effects and withdrawal symptoms.

          • some_kind_of_guy@lemmy.world
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            I would at least appreciate it if doctors were permitted to jump ahead to the actually effective stuff (i.e. ketamine, psilocybin therapy) without having to force the patient through the gauntlet of ineffective drugs first. I believe it’s insurance companies to blame for that one. They would rather not pay out for quarterly/yearly/one time ketamine treatments that actually work, because that means their money isn’t flowing in the preferred direction. I guess they prefer us to die buying tainted drugs off the street.

          • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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            1 day ago

            Doctors are generally not subject to malpractice suits for engaging in what was believed to be the best practice at the time. That’s how it should be, because that’s how science works.

            We electroshocked and then lobotomized the patient, they’re basically a 4 year old now mentally, but thats all fine because the science at the time said so.

            We smoked in our office consults with pregnant women, but thats all fine because science said so at the time.

            … Uh, nah, no, at least from a morality perspective.

            So, so much tangible quantifiable financial damage done to so many people by sideffects and then meds for those sideffects…

            Legally, yeah, maybe not malpractice if … thats the actual legal standard, maybe it falls on the drug mfgrs legally, but uh what ever happened to harm reduction, is it now maybe time to have some kind of actual reckoning with this as a field/industry?

            To me, at this point, in the US, psychiatrists are basically very snobby and arrogant drug salesmen, who will confidently tell you they know what they’re doing and then oops turns out they don’t.

            Your second paragraph illustrates this perfectly.

            Don’t even have a method of assessing how any of this should work.

            Just no clue, none, might as well be popping random pills at a rave, nearly the same epistemic level of ‘will this do what the person i got it from said it will’, difference being stuff from a psych is very unlikely to be cut.

            This is is mad scientist level shit.

            15% chance it works, 85% chance it doesn’t, you’re all experimental test subjects actually who were not informed of that.

            I dunno about you but I don’t tend to trust people who tell me to do something and tell me its all very well understood, and then oh haha, no it isn’t.

            I had MDD for a while and my psychs ran me through an ever increasing gauntlet of drugs for it that justade everything worse and worse, to the point I now have them all listed as things I am allergic to, turns out I just needed less stress and pressurr in my life and to get away from my abusive family.

            This should be a nationwide scandal.

            https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db528.htm

            Roughly 1 in 10 people in the US are on anti-depressants, … and for 85% of them, that can basically only be neutral to harmful.

            Maybe revoke all these things as approved treatments and move them back to the experimental trials phase, stop using about 30 million people as test subjects, and also lying about that?

            • Zak@lemmy.world
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              1 day ago

              None of those things are “fine”. They just shouldn’t result in penalties for individual doctors who were following established best practices.

              The problem should be addressed at institutional and structural levels. Drug companies shouldn’t be allowed to throw away 30 studies with inconclusive results and get approved based only on the two with positive results. Drugs that work by inducing a structural change like SSRIs shouldn’t be approved for indefinite use, and if that evidence is found after their initial approval, the approval should be amended. Drug companies should never have been allowed to advertise that depression is a “chemical imbalance in the brain” which is corrected by their drugs when there was never evidence for that beyond the drugs having an effect.

              • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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                1 day ago

                Sure, ok, yeah, we need systemic change at a fundamental level, yep, totally agreed.

                Anyway, do any psychiatrists have any morals?

                Why do we even have medical ethicists when basically the entire system is fundamentally broken, the extent and details of this are well known to experts, but they just content themselves with ‘doing their best’, and require layman to investigate how full of shit all of this is?

                How can you work in this field and sleep soundly at night at the same time?

                Sorry, right, like, I’m an anarchist, the ‘point’ of a system is what it actually does, not what it claims to do or aspires to do.

                Road to hell, good intentions, all that.

                This is all provably ludicrous, and imo, the field should be on fire, revolting in droves at how fucked up this situation is and how they won’t participate in a massively harmful and morally dubious system.

                Otherwise, I guess the Hippocratic Oath isn’t a thing for psychiatrists, this is just their day job.

    • TheTechnician27@lemmy.world
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      2 days ago

      with less interpretation of social cues and a greater ability to focus.

      “ability to focus” is more accurately described as “tendency to focus”. “ability to focus” connotes control over focus, which… from lived experience and what I’ve read, just isn’t generally true. Autistic inertia – the inability to defocus and then focus on a new context – is very real. Autism is a neurodevelopmental disorder not just because of an ignorance of social cues but because of how rigid, inflexible patterns of behavior often interfere with daily life.

      • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        Autist here:

        Yeah, describing it as simply ‘greater’ or ‘lesser’ ability to control or maintain focus is… well, too simplistic.

        I can, when it comes to task, hyperfocus on something like writing a piece of complex code / software, try to solve a real world engineering problem, do a comprehensive data analysis of some topic, write a chapter of a novel… I can hyperfocus on that for a solid day or week or month, and I have to actively remind myself to do things like eat and sleep regularly, because I know I tend to get obsessively focused on ‘the task’.

        Shifting to another task, another very different … realm of thinking, or way of thinking, is often very jarring and exhausting.

        But on the flip side, when socializing, people tend to say I am scatter brained, overwhelming, because I just flow all the way through my entire chain of concept associations to end up with a resulting… thing I am trying to say.

        Sort of like how modern agentic AI has an ‘explain its thinking process’ mode.

        Thats just the default for me, its all an explicit, conscious train of thought.

        For me, summarizing that chain of thought into just a resultant ‘thing to say’ is the difficult part, that I get worse at the more mentally exhausted I am.


        Also, I would say most, not all, but most autists… its not that we are inattentive to or ignorant of social cues.

        Its that neurotypicals tend to process social cues mostly subconsciously, whereas autists tend to process social cues mostly consciously…

        … and that most neurotypicals actually all have widely variable, inconsistent and imprecise standards by which they judge and perform social cues, but most of them are unaware of this, to the point that they are overly confident that everyone has the same rubric and understanding of social cues as they do, when this very obviously is not the case.

        So, this confuses/overwhelms many/most autists, because they are presented with an inconsistent and variable ruleset, and then also told that this ruleset is consistent and invariable.

        Neurotypicals will often get angry/rude/frustrated/overwhelmed when you try to break this down and explain this to them, presumably because they largely are not aware of / do not have this explicit, conscious thought process, and tend to interperet being asked to formulate it in consistent, precise detail just as a rude, unreasonable thing to ask for.


        Basically, imo, NTs use a fuzzy, fast, less accurate, mostly unconscious heuristic to evaluate and perform social cues, and they tend to be very confident they are doing this correctly…

        … whereas Autists tend to logically and consciously go through an entire evaluation system, which is more robust and thorough in that its basically a discrete series of probabilistic associations, but this is all much slower, much more ‘computationally costly’ to perform.

        So, when an Autist is oversocialized, under too much pressure to perform socially, they can get overwhelmed and then either basically shutdown or freak out.


        This also works, imo, to explain why Autists tend to take longer to initially learn socialization cues and concepts… because they are having to build a much more conscious, step by step evaluation model of all possible micro/macro expressions, tonal shifts, inflexions, vocab choices, all possibly relevant context, etc, and this can often be much more difficult to establish when Neurotypicals are nearly entirely unaware of or dismissive of their own inconsistencies and variability when it comes to those things.

        This also works to explain why Autists are often seen as overly straightforward or blunt: They’re just telling you the result of their attempt to evaluate a social interaction.

        And this also explains why almost no NT person I’ve ever met can accurately assess my emotional state / social interaction disposition, yet they almost all are very confident they can do so correctly and precisely.


        EDIT

        And I will here comment on the meta-irony of all of this, that … any scientist could just ask a ‘high-functioning’ autist to explain how this works, and they could… you know, trust what a person says about how their own thought processes work?

        But nope, nope, still we are pathologized as if we are strange, alien, confused and confusing others, not valid sources of information as to how our own minds work, when our whole ‘problem’ is that we are way too aware of how our minds work.

        Why do you think PTSD coincides with the later Autism diagnosis group more strongly than the early diagnosis group?

        Because we have been saying shit like this our whole lives, and broadly, nobody cares and just makes up whatever explanation or understanding they prefer, which is almost always significantly innacurate/incomplete, so we tend to live lives of constantly being slandered and mocked, rarely being respected as human beings with full agency.

  • ExLisper@lemmy.curiana.net
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    So if autism is a broader term that includes multiple conditions shouldn’t we stop using it and start using the names of the actual conditions? Isn’t it basically like hysteria which was split into epilepsy, dissociative disorders, personality disorders and so on?

      • BrianTheeBiscuiteer@lemmy.world
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        In most cases the diagnosis is observational. Blood tests and brain scans aren’t used for this kind of thing, although that could change someday.

    • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      IMO, as a ‘high-functioning autist’:

      Yes.

      The field of psychology is constantly redefining things based on ever shifting subjective analysis of behavioral patterns, and uh, being someone who very much prefers concrete, consistent, definable rules and categories, logically followable mechanistic processes…

      Fucking yes, please, be more accurate and precise in a more objective way, based on far superior methodology, fucking please.

      • vaultdweller013@sh.itjust.works
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        I feel like at minimum we should have it broken up by different favors, kinda like how Asperger’s was a sub diagnosis under the umbrella of autism for awhile.

      • andros_rex@lemmy.world
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        12 hours ago

        Having been born female, it’s amazing how I was diagnosed with everything from paranoid fucking schizophrenia to bipolar rather than acknowledge ASD/ADHD.

        I remember cleaning out my locker once at the end of school and having a ton of crap just fall out on me. Absolutely no recognition of my lack of organizational/executive function skills because girls couldn’t possibly be ADHD/ASD.

        • village604@adultswim.fan
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          10 hours ago

          My wife’s ex therapist literally pulled out the DSM and said since she could make eye contact she couldn’t be autistic. Crazy shit

    • WindyRebel@lemmy.world
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      They do for many, but sometimes I think they don’t know exactly what or it could be multiple things which is why it’s the Autism Spectrum and it’s easier to say they are “on the spectrum” or “autistic” if you can’t pinpoint exactly what.

    • HobbitFoot @thelemmy.club
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      24 hours ago

      We refer to a spectrum of diseases as cancer even though they have a variety of causes. Given that autism has been described as a spectrum of various behaviors, I wouldn’t be surprised as variations of autism become understood.

    • snek_boi@lemmy.ml
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      Or we can take the process-based approach, where we stop caring about defining boxes perfectly and we start caring about patterns of thoughts and behaviors. This may sound woowoo or without empirical basis, but some of the most successful programs for verbal autism are based on these ideas, the AIM and PEAK programs.

      • badgermurphy@lemmy.world
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        I can understand why some would think that, as I once did.

        Physical therapy is similar in that it matters very little why you have pain. You can improve or eliminate the symptom by appropriately exercising the affected areas.

        Similarly, the behavioral treatments can take advantage of all humans’ natural adaptability to teach them to model and normalize more socially healthy behaviors.

        I’m totally out of my depth in these fields but I have been convinced through firsthand experience via physical therapy. I’m sure it is not a catch all solution to just attack the symptoms, but it does have positive observable results and it therefore seems at least noteworthy.

        • snek_boi@lemmy.ml
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          I’m glad you’ve seen positive results with physical therapy.

          I’d argue that a good physical therapist will understand the cause of the injury, so that they make a good treatment plan. Similarly, a good (contextual) behavior analyst will understand the causes for their patients’ difficulties, so that they can make a good treatment plan. When you know where you’re standing, it’s easier to move forward. That is why evaluation is crucial in both physical therapy and programs like AIM and PEAK.

  • Phoenixz@lemmy.ca
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    And with that, if possible at all, there is no single fix either.

    Get fucked by an umbrella, RFK

  • mcv@lemmy.zip
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    The analysis, published last week in the journal Nature, showed that children diagnosed before the age of 6 were more likely to have behavioral difficulties—such as problems with social interaction—from an early age. In contrast, those diagnosed after the age of 10 were more likely to experience social and behavioral difficulties during adolescence.

    So if you have behavioral problems early, you’re more likely to get diagnosed early, when you have behavioral difficulties later, you’re more likely to get diagnosed later.

    The phrasing here seems to want to imply a reverse causal relationship, but I’m pretty sure the conclusion here is that kids don’t get tested for autism before they display autism-like behaviour.

    As for the actual causes of autism, I recently read that the genetic and family is about 60-90% of the causes, making it by far the biggest cause, and not environmental factors like RFK likes to suggest. But it’s not a single gene, it might be other stuff, and it’s not an on/off thing but a big pile of factors that add up.

    But there are also environmental factors that do have an impact. Not vaccines or Tylenol, but some kinds of pesticides, for example. Maybe that’s something RFK could focus on.

    • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      Its more than a tautology, you are oversimplifying.

      Or, well, as always with writings on or about science aimed at a general audience… the writers are oversimplifying, always read the paper.

      https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09542-6

      What they are describing is that those diagnosed early have a different behavioral psychological profile, different set of observed behaviors, than those diagnosed later.

      They are saying that ASD has roughly two different sets of distinguishable behavioral profiles, and one of those sets is so obvious it tends to get diagnosed early, and another set is less obvious such that it tends to get diagnosed later.

      While they seem hesitant to use the terminology of saying ‘there may be two fairly distinct subtypes of autism’, likely because they want to emphasize that more research needs to be done, they do not want to lead to people making rash and non nuanced conclusions… that basically is what they are saying, that there appear to be distinct genetic profiles that produce observably different ‘kinds’ of autism.

      They ran a battery of statstical meta analysis on different genomes and behavioral profiles of Autists, and this chart I think summarizes it best:

      (Those bars are 95% confidence intervals)

      Two, fairly distinct behavioral/neurodevelopmental/phenotypical profiles, that also go along with two, fairly distinct underlying genomic profiles.

    • SaraTonin@lemmy.world
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      Scientists from Cambridge’s Department of Psychiatry found that children diagnosed as autistic earlier in life (typically before six years old) were more likely to show behavioural difficulties from early childhood, such as problems with social interaction.

      However, those diagnosed with autism later on in life (in late childhood or beyond) were more likely to experience social and behavioural difficulties during adolescence.

      I assume that the paper itself frames this a little differently, because what this is saying is trust there’s a correlation between when traits become noticeable and when people get a diagnosis. Which is what you’d expect. You don’t tend to diagnose people who don’t exhibit the traits required for diagnosis.