are aspergers and hfa the same thing?

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Yes. You and many other people.

The differences are that people diagnosed with AS are not supposed to have speech delays while people diagnosed with autism can, and often do, have speech delays.

However, many people with AS do have speech delays that do not present as "not speaking in childhood", which is one reason why many are misdiagnosed.

I think that people diagnosed with AS tend to be less visibly autistic than those diagnosed with autism, but that this does not necessarily reflect better outcomes, and many people diagnosed with AS are not distinguishable (as adults) from those diagnosed with autism (as adults). The same is true as children, but the speech delay criteria means it is probably less likely.

Anyway, many people who do meet the autism criteria are incorrectly diagnosed as having AS because they spoke on time or early. And many others are diagnosed incorrectly because where one goes for a diagnosis may have more bearing on the label one receives than anything else. Some clinics may have a bias toward AS, some toward PDD-NOS, some toward autism.

All of the above are some of the reasons that all PDDs are being combined into a single autism spectrum disorder in the DSM-5.

It's a really common belief, yeah. It's not surprising that without specifically looking into it you might think that they are obviously different.

The differences are actually very hard to detect, and often quite arbitrary. Say you have one twin with "Asperger's Disorder", who has all of the traits of Asperger's. His identical brother has all of those traits, and also does not engage in imaginative play. That would give him the diagnosis of "Autistic Disorder". They really are that close.

In practical terms, it means that there's little agreement between clinicians about which specific ASD someone has. They are pretty good at telling whether or not you have autism, but they are very hit-or-miss in agreeing about whether you have Asperger's or autism or PDD-NOS. In adulthood, those who were "obviously" autistic when they were younger, with speech delays, can be identical to those who were "obviously" Asperger's with pedantic, formal speech. In fact, childhood history can be the only difference and often is.

This is why they want to merge the whole shebang into "autism spectrum disorder" and just acknowledge that sub-dividing it is not working out. This is simply a disorder with a wide variety of expression.

Sometimes there is no speech delay in HFASD either. Sometimes there is with Aspergers.

There is no hard and fast rule.

Im the opposite of animalcrackers.
When I was first dx'd with aspergers I would tell people that I have "a mild form of autism" on the assumption that no one would know wtf aspergers was ( hell- my own damned therapist had never even heard of 'aspergers' before my mom and sis suggested that I might have it to her).

But to reiterate several posts above- AS and HFA are pretty much like six and half of dozen- atleast when applied to adults and adolencents. If you learned to speak at the normal time (as I did) then you are an aspie, if there was a speach delay (or speach loss maybe) then they would label you 'autistic'. The two disorders were discovered seperately. Only later did they realize that they could be related disorders. And now in the USA they decided to ditch the label aspergers altogether- so- I guess- speech delay or not- you're HFA in the USA ( im a poet - and I dont know it!).

But at eight years old I was the textbook speciman of the pedantic "little professor"- so I still think that I am an 'aspie'- gosh darn it!

I like this way of saying it




I'm confused -- how are we opposites?

With Asperger's, IQ must be at least normal. With autism, IQ is unspecified and can in theory be anywhere. That, plus the onset of speech, is one of the main diagnostic differences. Well, according to stuff I read, but I admit it seems to depend upon who you read.

I meant that I always thought of the two conditions as alike, and not as being different.

I've kinda read too much in this subject, and what I've found is that:

Someone with AS can be just like someone with HFA and someone with AS can be different to someone else with AS.

Thanks for clarifying!

I'm not sure we're opposites in that way, exactly -- just a little different. I started off unable understand how Asperger's and HFA coud be two separate things, because they were both called "autism". I didn't understand how something that was autism could not be autism....how can something be "autism" and "not-autism" at the same time?

The way it was explained to me was that AS and HFA are different in terms of speech delay and behavior, and I accepted that even though I understood only the language delay part and not the part about behavior, and was still very confused by the language used to talk about them.

After I read a lot about possible differences between AS and HFA (to find out what "behaviors" were different), I came to think that the real difference was in the diagnostic categories alone. The diagnoses themselves are non-material artefacts of human ideas and subjective categorization/description of autistic behavior, and they don't reliably match up with real differences in the concrete, neurophysiological stuff about a person that makes them autistic...which nobody knows very much about, in the first place.

Which is all to say: I don't think AS and HFA are actually different conditions. I think it's the diagnostic categories that create artificial distinctions.