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Welcome to Stuff Mom Never Told You from Howstuffworks.com.

Cristen

Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I’m Cristen.

Molly

I’m Molly.

Cristen

So, Molly, here at Stuff Mom Never Told You, a lot of times we talk about women-specific health issues. This time we’re going to take a little different tack with that because we’re talking about autism today. Generally speaking, autism and the autism spectrum of disorders is considered much more of a boys’ problem than a girls’ problem. The statistic that’s often thrown out is that boys are four times more likely to be diagnosed with an autism spectrum disorder than girls.

So we wanted to look at why is this, why are girls underdiagnosed? There are girls who have been diagnosed with autism, Asperger’s, et cetera, but a lot of the coverage that you see is really dealing – treats it as something – as a male epidemic.

Molly

Uh-huh. There are some researchers who are saying that’s really harming girls who aren’t getting a diagnosis that they need. So before we dive into it, perhaps we should give a little bit of an overview about autism. We’re probably not going to cover everything that parents and interested persons out there are interested in. It’s a big topic, it can be a very controversial topic. We’re going to kinda give you a little bit of an overview that serves the needs for what we’re going to talk about later.

Cristen

Yeah. Autism is a complex neurobiological disorder of the development that lasts through a person’s lifetime. There are three main categories within the autism spectrum disorders and that includes autistic disorder, which is also called classic autism, Asperger’s Syndrome, which you’ll often hear referred to as high functioning autism now, and also pervasive developmental disorder not otherwise specified, or atypical autism.

Molly

Now the reason that there are so many categories is that symptoms really manifest themselves in different ways, which is why autism is considered to have this spectrum. You can be at one end and be, as Cristen said, very high functioning. Then you can be on the other end of the spectrum and be sorta at this classical example of someone who doesn’t speak, doesn’t make eye contact, doesn’t really engage in social activity.

Even though referring to the spectrum as sort of the [inaudible], we’re kinda going to talk about autism just as a unit in this podcast. Please know that we are aware that it is a spectrum. Not every case of autism is the same, but there are a few signs and symptoms that kinda mark the condition, the main one being the thing we talked about with communication; it’s usually not as strong. One of the main one being communication, where people with autism usually lack the ability to communicate with their peers and those around them.

Social interactions where they may not interact and show emotion in the way that other children do, may not demonstrate empathy and understanding what other people are thinking, and stereotyped behaviors, which is sort of a repetitive behavior. Obsession with certain toys, obsession with certain activities like counting, singing, repeating certain sentences over and over again. What am I leaving out, Cristen? What else do you think is sort of a case of stereotypical red flags for autism?