Comments on: Diagnosis by 18 Months

By: One-fiftieth of a second

One-fiftieth of a second — Sun, 30 Nov 2008 22:07:15 +0000

[...] methods currently being developed to diagnose autism in very young (1 year and under) children involve studying babies’ eye movements and [...]

By: Marla

Marla — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 18:24:06 +0000

We saw many neurologists, child psychiatrists, child psychologists and pediatricians…none diagnosed M as being autistic early on. Most said, “She may outgrow it. It is too early to know.’ or worse blamed us for certain developmental issues. I wish, looking back I would have taken her to the Clevevland Clinic in Ohio much earlier than we did. We did not get a real good diagnosis until she was nine years old. That is a long long time of not knowing.

By: Kristina Chew, PhD

Kristina Chew, PhD — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 05:18:29 +0000

It was chiefly joint attention that Charlie lacked—the one thing that he did not do, was to show and share with us some thing that had caught his fancy. It felt very novel to me, when I first saw a baby do this, and I realized that Charlie never had.

By: Regan

Regan — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 04:17:56 +0000

FirstSigns
http://www.firstsigns.org/

This would have useful to us in the way back when.

By: Leila

Leila — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 01:10:15 +0000

I’d say the most important red flag is lack of pointing and sharing. Since the presence of verbal language and even eye contact may vary so much for kids in the spectrum, I think that this early form of shared attention and communication is the one that’s pretty much absent in autistic toddlers. Typical kids may not talk yet but they are pointing at things and babbling or grunting to get our attention to that interesting object. They bring things and toys to show you.

By: Kristina Chew, PhD

Kristina Chew, PhD — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 00:31:06 +0000

@Owl, Charlie learned to sign before he was able to speak—-he was 2 and some months, and could imitate actions, but was not yet able to imitate sounds. But this was after he had been diagnosed, too.

By: Owl

Owl — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 00:13:09 +0000

Is sign language acquisition before verbal language acquisition common for autism (in a normal hearing child)? I know a boy like that whose parents are looking into a spectrum diagnosis, but never found it in the literature.

By: Emily

Emily — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 19:34:47 +0000

TH *still* hides under tables or beds when someone new comes in. And now the baby does the same thing.

By: Moi ;)

Moi ;) — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 19:07:41 +0000

Well, “back in the day”….meaning circa 1995, we took Bug to DuPont Children’s Hospital and saw the head of developmental pediatrics (among others). They had no clue.

A ped that worked in the office we used to go to said Bug was retarded, because he was hiding under the table (playing hide and seek with the doctor). Had he done one test? No.

The school said he had one thing, an audiologist said yet another. We had a total of **7** different Dxes for him from people who didn’t know their hind from a hole in the ground. AND had to wait 4 years on a waiting list to get an appointment at CHOP before we got the final (accurate) Dx.

In total, it took us TEN YEARS to get the proper diagnosis. Even though *I* knew, just from reading the internets.

So while it’s a good idea to have early dx, you’d better be sure that the doctor(s) in question know what the hell they are doing. Because a wrong Dx can hold your child’s education back for YEARS. (I am not going to even get started here on what havoc the wrong Dx does with services in school. Rest assured, it is hell.)

By: Emily

Emily — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 18:21:34 +0000

We saw (and recognized in hindsight) the signs of autism in our oldest son VERY early…obsessions with odd things (acorns, eggs), spinning anything that would spin but not actually playing with the toy the “normal” way; massive meltdowns we just couldn’t figure out, triggered by we didn’t know what; a relative inability to use language as communication or close “circles of communication”; repetitive, nonproductive behaviors; and echolalia. BUT…he looked at us! He talked on time! These were the two primary criteria at the time he was two, so we thought everything was fine. Now…his social problems, major anxiety, etc., really started to emerge when he was three. But now, I’d look for not closing those circles, for a lack of imaginary play or “appropriate” play with toys, lining up things, and spinning as those earliest signs.

We’ve been watching our youngest closely because of his oldest brother’s diagnosis (our middle son is not on the spectrum). He’s shown some “red flags” that are far more evident and that we’d even have noticed were he our first. The most obvious is that he does not talk, and he’s almost 18 months old. Not a word to communicate specifics. He has no words for the people in his life. He lost the one word he had at age one, which was “Daisy,” the name of our dog. He just recently began to sign “more,” which he uses for everything. He had major motor milestone delays and now exhibits obvious hemiplegia, tucking up his left arm in the guard position and hold the hand rigidly, making a circle with his thumb and middle fingers. These are far more obvious signs, and he’s not quite 18 months yet.

He does three therapy appts a week, two for speech and one for his motor skills; he just started the speech appts and has been doing motor skills since before turning one because his deficits were so obvious. How will he turn out? We obviously do not know. We are not refrigerator parents by any stretch, but even after all of our experience with our first son, we are still learning some new things from therapies that we find are useful.