4/23/2024 0 Comments Asd dsm 5 research paperImportantly, it has also been shown that premature mortality exists in individuals with ASD and could be related to depression-linked suicidality making this a topic of great concern. In terms of the latter, it has, indeed, been demonstrated that adults with ASD are at a much higher risk of being diagnosed with depression and anxiety disorders, whose development appears to be linked to autism-related difficulties in everyday life. While the transition to adulthood often sees improvements and a reduction in the severity of autism symptoms, adulthood is also often associated with profound difficulties in different areas of life for autistic persons, which can bring about or exacerbate psychiatric comorbidities. Second of all, the presence and history of other psychiatric symptoms often complicates the assessment as those symptoms need to be considered as part of a wide differential diagnosis ranging from affective and anxiety disorders to OCD and personality disorders, all of which are known to affect social interaction abilities, and in terms of psychiatric comorbidities. Importantly, however, an autism assessment in adults provides important challenges: first of all, it can be difficult or even impossible to gather information from parents or caregivers about early childhood development to ascertain the presence of autism-specific symptoms during that period. In other words, autism is not (only) a childhood disorder, but one that persists across the life span, and autism is not-as once thought-inevitably associated with severe cognitive and language impairments. and other studies, those, who receive a diagnosis only in adulthood, generally have average or above-average cognitive abilities and need low to medium levels of support. Today, a growing number of specialized autism services is also available in adult psychiatry. This, the authors argue, could be related to a certain prerogative of child psychiatry with regard to diagnosing a neurodevelopmental disorder and adult psychiatry having been relatively slow to catch up to the idea of a late diagnosis of autism. This is pointed out by a study by Fusar-Poli and colleagues who described that the diagnosis of autism is not always made in childhood or adolescence, but that there is evidence for a diagnostic gap of as a long as 11 years between a first evaluation performed in adolescence and a formal diagnosis of autism being made in adulthood. Despite a significant increase in the number of autism diagnoses over the past decades, which have indicated that this life-long neurodevelopmental disorder affects around 1–1.5% of the general population making ASD a relatively common psychiatric disorder, the topic of missed diagnoses and misdiagnoses particularly in the case of autistic adults/adults with ASD continues to be an important issue.
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