Differences between High-Functioning Autism and Aspergers?

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You need to understand the history of psychology and autism to understand the difference.

Leo Kanner was a US based researcher who recognised autism in children considered low functioning with 2 higher functioning children in the 1940s. He published his finding in English and the English speaking research community then identified higher functioning children and called this high functioning autism.

Hans Asperger recognised higher functioning children with autism at the same time as Kanner and published his results in his native tongue, German. It was therefore ignored by English speaking researchers until a UK based German researcher (Frith) translated it into English in 1991.

Asperger Syndrome was included in DSM-IV as a separate but similar condition to classical autism in 1994.

By the time DSM-5 was published in 2013 enough was known about autism to realise that Aspergers was in fact no different to classical autism and it was therefore classified as one condition - autism/autistic spectrum disorder.

High functioning ASD was recognised by English speaking researchers while Asperger Syndrome was recognised by non-English speaking researchers. While different people talk about differences between HF autism and Asperger syndrome there is no actual evidence to back it up. In the same way there is no actual evidence that shows a difference between classical ASD, HF ASD and Asperger syndrome.

I don't think the DSM-5 actually has eliminated subcategories. I think they've just created new ones based on symptom-severity instead of symptom-clusters and given them number-names instead of letter-names. (Which is funny because the old labels were often misused in a way similar to severity labels -- where either Asperger's or PDD was seen as the least severe, and Autistic Disorder the most severe).

I think the new severity levels are too vague and will be applied inconsistently. What, for example, is the specific meaning of words like "significant" and what is the difference between things like "distress" and "great distress"? What is the difference between "interferes with" and "markedly interferes with"? Clinicians will make decisions about these things based on the populations in their own practices + their own personal definitions, and those things vary from clinician to clinician.

Given that there is nothing in the new DSM that defines what "support" vs. "substantial support" vs. "very substantial support" looks like (i.e. what specific supportive acts are needed; how often are these specific supportive acts needed; how many people are needed to provide these specific supportive acts; and what, if any, training do the people providing these specific supportive acts need to have?) the new severity levels don't seem much better than a clinician writing that someone has "mild" vs. "moderate" vs. "severe" autism and then needing to specify what they mean and what types of support are/might be required by that individual.

I don't think you can get away from some degree of inconsistency when diagnosis is made by observation of behavior alone because it will never be 100% objective (and there will always be clinicians who are not well-trained or have personal biases or lack good clinical judgement) but I think that clinicians and researchers should try to develop standardized measures for the severity levels.

They have different names