What is severe autism?

We have to wait, patiently, for the DSM-V people to cough up their system forranking and classifying all autistics according autism " severity. " In the meantime, some recently reported data are worth mulling over.First,here is the most recent unofficial DSM-V autism " severity " ranking-system proposal, andhere is my response, including information about instruments commonly claimed to measure autism " severity. " The current official DSM-V void in this area can be locatedhere.An increasingly prominent measure of autism " severity " is the Social Responsiveness Scale.Developed by John Constantino, it now exists in different age-range versions. Its purpose encompasses quantifying what are presumed to be autistic traits, from none on up, across the full range of humanity.The SRS is a 65-item questionaire most often filled out by parents or teachers, whose ratings classify children according to "severity of autistic symptomology. " Higher scores, above an established threshold, indicate greater autism " severity, " and are therefore considered worse.In a recently epublished high-profile paper (Roberts et al., in press), SRS scores were reported for 25 autistic children who were recruited then divided into two groups according to performance on a popular test of language abilities.The children were about 10 years old. Sixteen autistic children classified as non-language-impaired achieved an average language ability score of ~100, right at the mean for the administered test. In c...
Source: The Autism Crisis - Category: Child Development Source Type: blogs