Autism in girls

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Has anyone seen this? I thought it was interesting.

http://abcnews.go.com/Nightline/story?id=4177353&page=1

I don't have time to go deep into the matter at hand, but I like to think there are more ASD girls than originally though. We need more girls.

I'm an Aspie girl! BTW, I posted a comment on that site, chastising them for their sensationalism about the "spread" of autism.

Last edited by hartzofspace on 24 Jan 2008, 11:42 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I hadn't seen that article. Thanks for sharing it. I am glad to see this topic addressed in the media finally. People don't understand what I struggle with, because they think the my coping mechanism (quietness) is a delightful, girly trait.

All I can say is...Finally, someone wrote something about FEMALES on the spectrum!

i have even been told, girls don't get autism. riiiight. well I'll be over here stimming while you carry on denying it

That little girl reminds me strongly of myself (with the clear exception that I was never diagnosed, nor even suspected of AS afaIk).

I do hope that awareness gets raised a little more on this issue - I hate to say it, but I think that it's a symptom of the inherent sexism of the culture that this kind of thing goes unnoticed in girls.

I find it very curious that the majority of women professionally diagnosed with AS are diagnosed in adulthood; whereas most men with AS were diagnosed as children(if not AS then at least something-I was diagnosed at the age of 3 with PDD-NOS).
I here the same story from Aspie women: growing up I always knew I was different, but the adults didnt really seem to notice. I believe that even if AS is more common in women than previously thought, it manifests itself in a VERY different way.
Moreover Ive come to conclude that AS in women usually isnt as pronounced as it is in men-so it often goes undetected.

It was hard to watch the video of the little girl--- it made me think of way back when I was a girl. No matter what you do, you either end up acting completely wrong or do a bad mimic of what other kids do. I am an adult now, so I don't care so much about what other people are doing or what they think of me ( what good would it do, anyway? if they accept me, fine. otherwise, oh well). But when you're a kid, things really do hurt alot and it does seem like the "end of the world" when everyone rejects you--- perhaps because you only have the experiences and intellect of a kid. You can't possibly know that there IS something beyond grade school. Uggghhh.

hello

i think that as has so many guises for different people, i know a man with as who is far more sociable than i could ever be, i think that it is just more accepted for girls to be quiet and nervous than boys, as a girl i spent most of my time by myself reading, the adults did not find me strange for this, they found me strange for being into science, when the other girls wanted to learn cooking i wanted to do wood work, i knew what i was going through as a child but without anyone around to turn to and ask (my mother and i had a hate, hate relationship ) i just become introverted, but teachers liked this as i did not make any trouble, but if i had been a boy people would have been asking why i was not into sport or fooling around with the other boys, so i think it has a little to do with people's expectations of the gender differences that makes it harder to get early diagnoses as a girl,

I was a total Tomboy. I felt like a boy until puberty and then everything went very loopy. Hormones are hell.

I agree, and then we might hear fewer stupid statements like "there are four times as many males with autism as there are females". I think it's wrong to say that because there is obviously so much underdiagnosis of females with ASD.

the one in four statistic relates to studies in which a random sample of adults are tested for autistic traits. the figure for diagnosed ASD's is one in ten.

Of course, those studies could be incorrect if the people looking for the traits were not aware of how they manifested themselves in women.

I think I read somewhere that WP membership is pretty much 50/50.

thanks for posting this. i saw it on tv the other night, but i wasn't wearing hearing aids and live captions are the worst.
the article cleared up a lot for me in terms of what was being said.

I've heard that too, but I think that a higher proportion of the NTs posting (due to family members with AS) are women.

I didn't see this before. But when our daughter was diagnosed more than 20 years ago as profoundly autistic, they weren't diagnosing mild functioning at all. So the diagnoses at the time were pretty consistent. We met parents of boys also diagnosed and they were quite similar in most ways with Athena. The doctors told us at the time that the ratio was 1 in 4. Which immediately made me wonder about x-chromosome deactivation in women.

Jon