Is AS more common in boys, girls or neither?

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Women have different neurological structures, though-- not extremely different; but different. Being more communication-oriented in the first place, and more sensitive to emotions (that's probably cultural in part), they might have autistic traits offset by a female brain. And girls tend to be generalist instead of specialist; they're better at making connections between different areas of thought at the expense of being worse at specific things, while guys are better at focusing on one subject, possibly missing the connections a female would make.

I'm an Aspie girl... if I were male, I might have had that language delay and more communication problems, and been HFA instead. And even so, I wasn't diagnosed until a year ago; had I not had depression and lucked out on a psychiatrist with personal experience with AS, it's doubtful I'd ever have been diagnosed at all--just having thought of myself as a strong-willed child and an eccentric adult.

AS and being female do interact with me. I'm asexual, so there aren't any girl-guy issues to worry about; but having a female brain... definitely.
My interests are general. I jump from topic to topic, sticking with one intense interest for as little as three months (or as much as five years). But they don't stay in one area--one look at my list of interests, everything from physics to feral cats to "Lord of the Rings" (BEFORE the movies came out)--makes it clear that I'm a generalist, or at least as far as AS allows me to be. And though I go on and on about obsessions, I've also learned to make small-talk (which is boring) and to make my going-on-and-on seem at least partially "normal"--that's the female communication focus coming to the forefront. In my physics labs, where my partners were always male, I'd usually make those obscure observations that made the experiment easier for everyone--little things about the apparatus or procedure that, when changed, worked wonders. But the guys never noticed them, because they were focused on the experiment only--not on all the things that could possibly be associated with it.

Not that there's a huge difference between guy and girl brains--it's probably less than the difference between an Aspie and NT brain--but it might be enough to make the difference between being diagnosed and not. A girl who'd be diagnosed with AS might just be seen as "shy, but nice"... while the same girl with an extra Y chromosome might be seen as "a loner who needs help" when he spurns a school basketball game to read about butterflies...

This has been really informative, thanks guys! I had always wondered this, and it almost makes you think that we should have TWO methods of diagnosis and requirements for each gender! But I wouldn't want that as it would just make things more confusing than they are already! This has helped out with the forming of my story, and whether a character should be a girl or a guy. Once again, thanks, but keep posting your ideas and theories!

more men have autism than women due to genetics... this goes the same for any other sex-linked heritable condition.

the reason for this has to do with sex chromosomes. women have 2 X chromosomes while men have an X and a Y chromosome. soemthing like 99% of your sex-specific genetic information is found on your X chromosome(s)... sorry guys, that Y chromosome really is only there to attatch your penis ...

so, if a women has a bad copy of a gene on one of her X chromosomes, her other X chromosome can take over for the expression of that gene (because the other X chromosome contains another copy of the same genes) and that woman will still have a normally functioning gene.

if a man has a bad copy of a gene on his X chromosome, he's kinda out of luck becuase he doesn't have another X chromosome to take over the expression for that gene and pick up the slack. so in this case, the bad copy of the gene gets expressed.

Edit: sorry guys... caught myself in a nerdy faux pas. This whole thing should say that because there is a sckew in numbers of males vs females with autism and many other heritable conditions... they suspect at least one of the genes involved are on the X chromosome... which gives you the skew of percent of sexes affected by these types of conditions~ for the above stated reasons.

Last edited by Sedaka on 14 Oct 2006, 5:38 pm, edited 2 times in total.

It's a good thing I listened in Science when we were doing genetics, otherwise I wouldn't have gotten a word of that!

I think appearances are deceiving in more ways than one. That is, Asperger's fundamentally effects the sexes differently. Remember, it's called the autistic spectrum, and Asperger's could conceivably be a whole section of it. A guy who just happened to get the other X chromosome in a different universe could very well be, by all accounts, an NT out of the box in that latter universe.

Alternatively, having an extra set of testosterone-producing glands down there could put someone at greater risk of spontaneously developing the disorder, if we are to indulge the "hyper-masculine" theory (as well as humor me.)

Yet at the same time, I think it works the opposite way round for the social interaction aspect of the spectrum. I think there's a far greater expectation for women to be sociable and want to chat and gossip, and if a female has difficulty in doing that or simply doesn't want to, she becomes a pariah - whereas I think it would be more acceptable for a man and people would be more inclined to just say he was quiet/very work-orientated, etc.

Don't quit yet, Sedaka, That was interesting stuff. I realize you were being rhetorical in referring to the genetic basis of aspergers as a "bad copy" of a gene, but there is more to that besides all the usual "Yay for us."

Aspies are well above average in our ability to learn about subjects that interest us. It seems to me that the genetic basis for asperger's switches off a complex of genes that normally produce an intuitive comprehension of nonverbal communication while it switches on a complex of genes that produce curiosity.

Gender is determined by the genome of the sperm cell. Every human egg cell contains a copy of one of the mother's X chromosomes. The sperm cell contains either a copy of the father's X or Y chromosome. A male cannot inherit an X chromosome from his father.

If it is true that the genetic trigger for asperger's is located on the X chromosome, this would mean that asperger's would, as you stated, be much more common among males, but it would also mean that there would be absolutely no inheritance of asperger's from fathers to sons.

I think it is frequently underdiagnosed in females, who have a different language structure within their brain organization. As more research is done this may improve. Sort of the way medicine didn't belive women had as many heart attacks as men until it was demonstrated that their symptoms were significantly different.

I also agree that one of the reasons it is under diagnosed in females may be that females are indeed less disruptive in a classroom, but I've no empirical evidance to support that theory.