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11:30am December 28, 2011

A note about “regressive” autism

(Full disclosure: That’s what I’d be classified as. I lost speech sometime between 15 and 18 months old and took awhile to get it back. But was also obviously different from long before this happened.)

There’s this interesting fact I’ve heard from people who make it their business to read all the autism science they can, and evaluate it critically.

See… autistic people who lose language in early childhood (that’s those of us who really did this, not those whose parents misremember it after exposure to antivax propaganda)… there’s a pattern to our language loss.

We do it after learning a certain number of words. Nobody has told me specifically how many.

But here’s the interesting part.

People with Down syndrome almost always have speech delays whether they’re autistic or not. People with Down syndrome also have a high rate of autism.

When people with Down syndrome “regress”, they do it later. They do it when they have learned that certain number of words. So the average age of speech loss in people with DS is older than in people who are just autistic.

Totally demolishes the idea that it’s some kind of poisoning that does this.

I wish I knew the cites for this stuff but I don’t remember. I just thought people might want to know this information for the next time someone tries to convince you we are all poisoned or vaccine injured or other BS. That’s all coincidence, a matter of timing.

And honestly I suspect those of us who “regressed” are those who burned out after learning more of something (in this case speech) than our brains are able to handle and sustain. Which is the story of my life even past infancy – lots of shutdowns and burnouts, both short term and long term. And speech and language are always among the first things to go. I also suspect that many of us are the sort of autistic people whose skills move and fluctuate and slide around to accommodate the situation. But I have no science for any of that.