Aspergers Checklist | Symptoms
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Aspergers syndrome, a pervasive developmental disorder (PDD), has been described as a moderate for of Autism. It is now considered to be part of the broad spectrum of Autism, despite the fact that many with Aspergers actually have better than average intelligence.
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It is most often diagnosed in children and adolescents, and is characterized by difficulties in communicating with others and relating to and peers. Suffers also exhibit patterns of inappropriately repetitive behavior.
Patients with Aspergers Syndrome exhibit a broad range of symptoms that tend to concentrate in three areas. They are motor skills, social skills and thinking skills.
Using a Aspergers Checklist
It is difficult to diagnose Aspergers, because each individual characterization of the disorder may appear, in varying degrees, in normal, unaffected individuals. It is only when many of these indicators appear in the same individual that a diagnosis of Aspergers may be in order.
The Aspergers Checklist includes, as described, certain deficiencies in motor skills. These include an unusual degree of inability to play sports, and will be most easily noticed in an inability to easily learn how to ride a bicycle. Another telltale sign is not being able to learn how to tie shoelaces at the same age that most children do. Difficulty using a knife, fork and a spoon, as a part of normal table manners, is another point on the checklist. Finally, another thing to watch for is very poor handwriting.
For social skills, easily recognizable points on the Aspergers Checklist include a marked preference not to make eye contact with other people. There will also be difficulty in establishing friendships with peers. Difficulty with communications is also a point on the checklist. This will manifest itself in the sufferer not listening to others, and in the tendency to speak in monologues. There will also be difficulty in areas of nonverbal communications, such as not being able to read the body language or facial expressions of others.
For thinking skills, an important point on the Aspergers Checklist is mental rigidity. This is characterized by extreme discomfort when confronted with any situation that deviates from the familiar routine, such as a change in schedule. In a similar vein, the sufferer tends to have an uncommonly sharp focus of interests. This even extends to food choices; the individual in question tends to eat the same types of meals to the exclusion of everything else.
There is another set of thinking skills that also appear on the Aspergers Checklist that would otherwise appear to be innocuous or even positive when not considered along with the other items on the list. These include precocious skills at numbers and reading.
Sources
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