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11:23am June 30, 2014
Anonymous asked: Would it be possible to not display symptoms of autism until around age five, and could there be other causes of that?

autisticdrift:

No, autism is a “from birth” thing. It’s possible to display traits* that no one recognizes as such but they’d have to be there. It’s pretty well established that even as infants, autistic people have different social communication methods. 

I’m not sure about the second part of your question because you didn’t specific which traits you’re talking about. 

*symptoms are for diseases - traits, characteristics, etc. are much better choices when talking about the outward and inward signs of autism

Childhood disintegrative disorder is generally what they call it when children show no autistic traits until the age of five.  Asperger’s and PDDNOS also allowed diagnosis in people who didn’t show traits until that late.  It was only autism itself that specified you have to be under the age of three when you first started showing signs of it.

But there are a lot of people who really do seem to not show many obvious signs of autism until they hit school age, like age five.  And sometimes that’s because nobody was noticing earlier autistic traits, that were too subtle for anyone to pick up on.  And sometimes it’s because they had autistic traits but they were so very very mild until that age, that you really couldn’t tell from the outside.  And sometimes maybe some forms of autism start that late.  It’s not as if we really know what autism is, and what its boundaries are.  Sometimes I meet people whose diagnosis is schizophrenia, but they seem exactly like autistic people (including lacking any real psychotic traits) except that their traits didn’t show up until a later age (and were picked up as negative or disorganized symptoms of schizophrenia, even though they were pretty identical to autistic traits).  I would not be surprised if there were late-onset forms of autism out there, I mean that’s what CDD is for, that’s some of what PDDNOS has been used for.  And it’s quite possible that there are forms of autism where the brain differences start in the womb, but they don’t show obvious autistic traits until a later age than normal.  Because autistic traits, in diagnosis, are all about whether people can see them from the outside, not whether your brain is abnormal in some way on the inside all along but not showing it yet.