|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
The autism diagnosis has become so broad that it prevents a better understanding of how the autistic brain works, a Canadian researcher and psychiatrist says.
In a meta-analysis published in JAMA Psychiatry, researchers in Quebec and Denmark analyzed 11 previous major reviews on people with autism and people in the rest of the population.
Laurent Mottron, a research psychiatrist at the mental health unit of Montreal’s Rivière-des-Prairies Hospital and one of the study’s authors, said the problem is that the criteria have shifted to the point where a diagnosis could become nearly meaningless.
About 30 years ago, someone would need to show strong differences in social skills, facial expression and other characteristics to receive a diagnosis of autism.
“Now you just have to be slightly diminished,” Mottron said. “This paper confirms something everybody at the clinical level knows.”
The researchers’ analysis found that the differences between the groups in five of the seven main constructs that define autism, including emotion recognition, theory of mind, planning and brain size, have decreased over time.
[…]
