Mild Autism/Aspergers And Brain Damage?

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You shouldn't kill cereal. Even if it hurts you. Revenge is wrong.

you guys are having a lot of fun with the whole topic misspell. Congrats.......can we graduate 5th grade now and keep discussion going?

lmao! @ 'cereal killer' <- was SO thinking it!

I've had significant head injuries at ages 10, 12, 18, 26 and 33. Pituitary MRI showed anterior pituitary damage, along with partially empty sella (the sac that surrounds the pituitary gland). It's affected most of my pituitary hormones and I'm under treatment for them.

This is interesting to me because it's one of the things I'm questioning, if Asperger's is a valid diagnosis for me, and one of the main reasons I want to be evaluated for it, or if maybe my concerns have more to do with the other. I'm so confused right now.

Oh and I also know someone who had encephalitis age 12 and was diagnosed autistic age 50ish. Everyone always assumed it was the brain damage but it wasnt. She was plenty weird before then.

*laughing* oh man... 'plenty weird before then'... sorry, that made me chuckle...

The vision problems could come from retinal issues but that does sound like concussions... Wouldn't it be somewhat similar to the injuries experienced by football players or boxers? They often have repeated mild concussions to deal with and end up with cognitive impairment.

All these people talking about autism and brain injury--autistic people may be more prone to brain injury, what with the head-banging, and the dyspraxia making you more likely to have accidents, and the way we are more likely to be abused, bullied or otherwise assaulted. Maybe there are autistics with TBIs that go completely undetected because the symptoms are put down to autism.

I wonder how you would monitor that kind of thing... you'd have to detect the TBI. Getting a baseline cognitive test like they do with football players would be a good idea--but then it's difficult to test autistics. Still, the benefits of detecting otherwise missed TBIs in autistic people would be really quite significant...

Yeah it would be exactly like that. It'd be hard to get a cognitive baseline on me because my cognitive abilities slide around instead of staying still.

Specific things that have happened to me immediately after headbanging (many of these multiple incidents over the years):

* Temporary blindness
* Headache (including headache on the other side of my head which I understand is a really bad sign)
* Missing a stretch of time (hard to know if I passed out or what)
* Impaired coordination
* Dizziness or vertigo
* Nausea/vomiting
* Confusion/disorientation
* A feeling like the floor was bouncing up and down, tilting, actively jolting up and throwing me, etc. when walking

Which while I haven't looked it up it probably reads like a list of concussion symptoms. Worse, I have never sought medical attention for these even when they persisted for several months. I either didn't know I should, or was afraid of being given involuntary psych treatment or getting hostile reactions from doctors -- as people who try to fix these things many of them take self injury personally and think it's deliberately sabotaging their work. I have wanted to get tested for cumulative brain damage but haven't known how to ask. I understand this makes me more prone to dementia in old age as well. I banged my head from roughly the ages of 7 to ... mid to late twenties. I think I could still do it if not for my movement disorder making it harder, an effect I am glad of in a way. It ranged from occasional, to constant until my body tired out or the headbanging itself incapacitated me. I think it would be hard for me to avoid brain damage with that record.

Let me see ... you are on a forum for Aspies, and you are complaining about people taking things literally and getting distracted by details.

I can see how that could happen.

Its a valid discussion which should keep going. 1 - 2 jokes fine but it gets old when someone says cereal killer for the 12th time.

Well, there weren't twelve. There were only four posts making fun of the title. Three if you consider that my last post was actually about the morality of killing cereal.

There needs to be a 'like' button, this made me giggle, thanks!

Well, from what research is beginning to show, the brains of autistic subjects have an overload of cortical minicolumns (organization units of neurons). This results in areas of high connectivity...usually adjacent regions...and other areas of extreme low connectivity...distant portions. With the structural differences in the arrangement of neurons being spread throughout the cortex, I don't think that brain damage could reverse autism. Leisons, bruising, swelling, etc would be totally separate...unless perhaps due to the location of an injury, a symptom of ASD is exaggerated or masked with other symptoms. But who knows? There is still so much we don't know yet.

do not critisize g-d

Well I am pondering taking a psychology degree with the open university which will probably include a module on biological psychology so if I find out the answer I will let you know!

I used to get in an argument with one of my former online friends about if brain damage causes autism. He was hit by a car when he was six so what if that gave you autism like symptoms, does that make you autistic? I didn't think so and it just meant the person suffers from brain damage but he still kept saying he had AS and that his brain damage caused it. But I told him if he had symptoms before then, then there is a chance he could still have it. But he refused to ask his mother about his early childhood because he wanted her to think he was normal.

But yet if brain damage occurred at birth or in infancy or before three years old and the symptoms were onset before then, autism is diagnosed. But if it happened when the child was older past three years, I don't know then. Lot of people just say the person is just brain damaged, not autistic.

And aspie or not, anyone makes fun of a spelling error and makes a joke about it and not shut up about it after it has been said two times or a few.

That actually is how we used to fix our generators in Iraq. Fiddle with the wiring, smash it with a wrench or a hammer, and add some more fuel... Sometimes all it needed was the hammer.