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3:08pm July 31, 2013

➸ Fresh fuel reignites Asperger’s debate

josiahd:

absurdcreation:

Children with Asperger’s Syndrome have different electroencephalography (EEG) patterns to children with autism, reveals a study in the open access journal BMC Medicine With distinct neurophysiology, the study pours fresh fuel on the on-going debate about how Asperger’s should be classified. The most recent edition of the mental health manual, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5), published earlier this year, reversed the decision, lumping Asperger’s in with ASD.

EEGs can’t reliably distinguish autistic from neurotypical people. That’s why they’re not used to diagnose autism.

Given that, it’s kind of ridiculous to try to use them to distinguish autism subtypes.

Yeah seriously.

My LEGs over the years have been abnormal in a whole lot of ways, and they still can’t tell me for sure what a single one of them meant. (Intermittent focal slowing sometimes, constant diffuse slowing others.)

This reminds me of this guy I saw who claims to be able to diagnose a bunch of conditions by SPECT. When you can’t diagnose most brain things by SPECT at all. I lucked out and had one out the free conditions that can legit be evaluated that way, temporal lobe epilepsy. But the rest of it was just a racket.

He insisted to an autistic guy I knew that he must be on drugs. Like a long term habitual addicted user of hard drugs. This guy has never touched anything stronger than coffee. Not even by prescription. The doctor INSISTED his SPECT showed drug addiction.

And I’ve heard other awful stories from parents about the same guy.

There’s a whole big business out there in “diagnosing” things by brain scans that can’t be diagnosed by brain scan. If autism could be diagnosed by EEG, it’d be happening already.

The more you learn about brain scans and the function of the brain, the less you’ll be taken in. Sometimes you can tell someone scan isn’t normal. But you can’t always pinpoint what it means. And real doctors are honest about this.