Autism in girls

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I don't know if we "need" more girls, but there is currently a study retesting young women with anorexia nervosa for possible ASDs. There is another study (in planning stages and I really hope it gets off the ground) in which the goal is to retest women and girls previously diagnosed with personality disorders to see how large a percentage may be ASDs.

And depending on the type of autism, some groups are dominated by females, especially the lowest functioning.

I really believe with some of you that females usually have a different presentation of ASDs than males, and that as a result we get shafted as far as treatment and education. If we are labeled as whiny "borderlines" in need of severe boundaries, we are not going to get the understanding we deserve or have our needs met. I think anorexia serves a function for some AS females as a way to maintain control or release emotions or some brain chemical imbalance because they aren't understood and placed in a crazy place where grown ups do things and say things that make a young woman feel like they are going mad. Add the perseveration, and a bad situation gets worse.

And if we aren't classically feminine, we are ignored even further at a very crucial time in our development.

Just my two cents.

Sigh. R.

There is a marked difference in girls versus boys in terms of language processing. In this case, I'm not talking about subtle and questionable studies, as much as I mean studies in cases where there are severe injuries to specific regions of the brain and where quite similar operations are performed to remedy other severe problems -- such as the cutting of the corpus callosum.

A thought that crosses my mind from the results of studies of people such as those mentioned above is that differences in processing may lead to missed diagnoses for females because their language performance is more distributed and presents itself without the same "notching" that can, hypothetically, be more easily noticed in men. While all the other indicators are there, it may be that this difference contributes strongly to a lower incidence of detection by professionals or even differing diagnoses.

Jon

It sounds like my case, although I wasn't diagnosed until last year. Looking back, i had many symptoms of (high-functioning) autism. I became more Aspie like later on.

You know, I saw this a month or so ago and couldn't find more about it on the Internet. So thanks for posting this. After it aired, I was haunted by it. You never see anything dealing with girls and autism. I was always told there were way more boys than girls that had it. As a child, no one knew what was wrong with me. Autism or Asperger's was never brought up. It was always ADD. I could so identify with that little girl on the news clip. At least she was diagnosed early. I wish they had more personal stories or documentaries like these. It would help people understand it better. I guess there will always be a misconception with girls and autism. Hopefully that will change for the better. Again, thanx for the article.