Autism expert Simon Baron-Cohen writes in the New York Times that experts should move cautiously on the proposal to remove Asperger’s syndrome from the “Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.” He says such a move could have wide-reaching consequences for people and their families, as well as for insurers.

First, what happens to those people and their families who waited so long for a diagnostic label that does a good job of describing their profile? Will they have to go back to the clinics to get their diagnoses changed? The likelihood of causing them confusion and upset seems high.

Second, science hasn’t had a proper chance to test if there is a biological difference between Asperger syndrome and classic autism. My colleagues and I recently published the first candidate gene study of Asperger syndrome, which identified 14 genes associated with the condition.

We don’t yet know if Asperger syndrome is genetically identical or distinct from classic autism, but surely it makes scientific sense to wait until these two subgroups have been thoroughly tested before lumping them together in the diagnostic manual. I am the first to agree with the concept of an autistic spectrum, but there may be important differences between subgroups that the psychiatric association should not blur too hastily.

Simon Baron-Cohen, the director of the Autism Research Center at Cambridge University, is the author of “The Essential Difference.”

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 10th, 2009 at 11:26 am and is filed under Asperger's, autism, commentary, language, medicine. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.