New Autism diagnosis may restrict many children from services

The new autism diagnosis set forth by the American Psychiatric Association that may restrict many children services has many parents nervous they will have to pay out several tens of thousands of dollars in order to get the services the children require.

A committee of the American Psychiatric Association has spent several of the last years working on changing the criteria for a diagnosis of autism. With the new changes, the umbrella of autistic disorders will be included as one diagnosis. These disorders are autism, high functioning autism, Asperger’s disorder, Pervasive Developmental Disorder, Rett’s Syndrome, and Childhood Disintegrative Disorder.

What has the parents of these children concerned, or sometimes panicked, is that if their child no longer falls under the diagnostic criteria, they may no longer get the services required for their child. This can run into not only the thousands, but the tens of thousands of dollars each year. For a family with one autistic child, this can be devastating, but imagine if the family had two or more children with autism. However, the committee charged with amending the autism diagnosis criteria feel that there should be no need to fear because most of those already diagnosed with autism will still fall under the new criteria set in place.

Instead of the three areas of concern related to autism, the new criteria has only two domains. However, this still includes the same issues. The first domain is a blend of social and communication difficulties. Each child being evaluated with get a score on that criteria, so for verbal abilities the score ranks according to being able to speak, speak with single words, being able to use phrases or the ability to speak in full sentences. The APA states that using these very specific criteria, it makes the diagnosis itself more complex, but it also helps the clinician to focus in on a richer, better description of the autism specific to that child. This better description will help parents to achieve more indvidualized services for their loved one with autism spectrum disorder.

The second domain of diagnostic criteria is the fixated interests and repetitive behaviors. This can be evaluated through observation, parental reports of the behavior, and getting a history of the interests and behaviors of the affected individual.

Source : http://emaxhealth.com/1272/new-autism-diagnosis-may-restrict-many-children-services