AutismWeb Forum

Not Quite Autism: At the borderland of ASD
By James Coplan, MD
Created Jun 27 2010 - 7:33am

Any degree of atypicality, from mild to severe, can coexist with any degree of general intelligence, from Genius IQ to Profound Mental Retardation. Last week, we laid out a 2D graph, with Atypicality on the X axis, and IQ on the Y axis, as a way of capturing this relationship. Anyone with severe to moderate atypicality has autism; if the IQ is 70 or above (normal general intelligence), we refer to the condition as "high-functioning autism." Severe to moderate atypicality with IQ below 70 is "low-functioning autism." Moving to the right on the X axis, we have moderate to mild atypicality. Persons with moderate to mild atypicality plus pedantic, hyperverbal speech, have "Asperger Syndrome" (AS). In between AS and Autism are a group of children (or adults) who are clearly atypical, but don't fit the mold of either classical autism, or AS; hence, they are said to have "Pervasive Developmental Disorder, Not Otherwise Specified."

But the X axis does not abruptly end, as drawn in Figure 4. Rather, the right end of the X axis keeps on going, from mild to minimal atypicality, and finally shading into features that represent personality traits, rather than symptoms of a disorder.