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i
Differential Diagnosis of
Autism Spectrum Disorder
ii
iii
Differential Diagnosis of
Autism Spectrum Disorder
EDITED BY
K AT H E R I N E K . M . S TA V R O P O U L O S , P H D
AND
J A M E S C . M C PA R T L A N D , P H D
iv
DOI: 10.1093/med-psych/9780197516881.001.0001
9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
CONTENTS
Contributors vii
CONTRIBUTORS
viii Contributors
In the nearly 20 years that DSM-IV criteria were in existence, research had mush-
roomed as had the development of standardized assessment tools geared toward
these criteria. The convergence of DSM-IV and ICD-10 was also a major accom-
plishment and fostered the growth of research worldwide. At the same time, sev-
eral concerns arose relative to this approach to diagnosis, including diagnosis
among the young and the higher cognitively functioning, the need for a better
category class name than pervasive developmental disorder, and so forth (Mayes
et al., 2001; Ozonoff & Griffith, 2000). As part of the DSM-5 process, several im-
portant changes were made, including reliance on standardized assessment in-
struments rather than field trials (Greenberg, 2013).
In DSM-5 (APA, 2013) changes included the use of a new term, autism spec-
trum disorder (ASD), both for autism as a condition and the class of conditions
to which it belongs. The other diagnoses previously recognized in DSM-IV were
dropped. What had been the “triad” of impairments spanning social behavior,
communication, and repetitive and restricted behaviors was condensed in a
3
“dyad,” preserving restricted and repetitive behaviors but merging social and
communicative difficulties into a single domain of difficulties in social commu-
nication and social interaction. This social communication category was made
monothetic; that is, it required that a person demonstrate symptoms across all
three clusters to meet criteria for ASD. The restricted and repetitive behaviors do-
main remained polythetic, but with a reduced number of criteria. Onset in early
life was required. A new diagnosis was included in the communication disorder
section, social communication disorder (SCD), and included individuals with so-
cial language, likely covering some (but not all) the cases previously subsumed
under Asperger’s disorder and pervasive developmental disorder—not otherwise
specified (PDD-NOS). Of note, due to concerns of overstringency, a caveat was
introduced, so that those with “well-established” DSM-IV diagnoses of Asperger’s
and PDD-NOS could retain their diagnoses; this reflected a growing concern that
individuals would lose services with DSM-5. Several other changes were made
in terms of specifiers, for example, with catatonia and severity (see Volkmar &
McPartland, 2014).
Asperger’s disorder was first identified in 1944 (Asperger, 1944) and, in many
ways, set the stage for what has been an ongoing debate about narrow or broader
views of autism. This has become even more of an issue with the recognition of
the broader autism phenotype (BAP; Ingersoll & Wainer, 2014) and the recogni-
tion of the complexity of the genetics of autism (Yuen et al., 2019). Indeed, the
use of the term “autism spectrum disorder” in DSM-5 (APA, 2013) itself reflects
an awareness that while Kanner’s (1943) paper initiated the recognition of classic
cases of early infantile autism, there is indeed a spectrum.
Asperger’s disorder was not officially recognized until DSM-IV (APA, 2001),
and until that time research had been limited, and different views of the condition
had emerged. After its recognition research markedly increased, but continued
concerns about best approaches to diagnosis and inconsistency in diagnostic
practice limited this literature. It was dropped in DSM-5, even though a growing
body of work suggested important distinctions based on neuropsychological
problems, patterns of comorbidity, and family history as different from the higher
cognitively functioning case of autism (Miller & Ozonoff, 1997; Woodbury-Smith
et al., 2005). For example, Chiang and colleagues (Chiang et al., 2014) conducted
a meta-analysis of IQ profile differences in 52 studies of cases of higher func-
tioning autism and Asperger disorder. They noted that across these studies overall
IQ scores were higher in the Asperger group. This group also exhibited higher
verbal as compared to performance IQ, supporting the validity of a distinction
of these two categories. These different profiles have important implications for
intervention.
4
domains of function, ASD tends to affect verbal more than nonverbal abilities;
unsurprisingly, young children with language delays exhibit a similar profile
(Ventola et al., 2007). This pattern appears as early as 12 months of age in children
with ASD (Barbaro & Dissanayake, 2012; Macari et al., 2012) and narrows over
time for many, with overall IQ a potential factor in the magnitude of this discrep-
ancy (see Macari et al., 2020; Stenberg et al., 2020).
Well over a decade of prospective studies of infants at elevated familial like-
lihood of autism (i.e., infants with an older sibling with ASD) offer a window
into the earliest development of children with the syndrome (see Chawarska
et al., 2020) and also reveal that some infant siblings experience deficits strikingly
similar to those with ASD, even though they do not develop ASD themselves.
Distinguishing between these elevated-likelihood infants with the BAP and those
who develop autism can be remarkably difficult during the earliest stages of de-
velopment, as the overlap in behavioral presentation includes key autism symp-
toms at the first birthday (Georgiades et al., 2013; Macari et al., 2012) and into the
second and third year (Chawarska et al., 2014). The fact that elevated-likelihood
infants who do not develop autism can experience a range of autism symptoms
early in development suggests that the genetic liability to ASD is expressed vari-
ably (Chawarska et al., 2020).
Longitudinal follow-up of elevated-likelihood siblings has revealed much in-
sight about the unfolding of ASD over the first year. Delays in language, often the
first issue to trigger parental concern, include impairments in early speech such
as canonical babbling, speech-like vocalizations, and receptive and expressive lan-
guage indexed by standardized measures (see Chawarska et al., 2020). As a group,
12-month-olds later diagnosed with ASD show atypical social communication
and responsivity compared to peers, such as a smaller inventory of gestures, less
frequent social smiling, imitating, showing, requesting, responding to their own
name, and initiating joint attention with an adult social partner (Chawarska et al.,
2020). Restricted and repetitive behaviors, interests, and activities (RRBIAs), the
second core domain of ASD (DSM-5; APA, 2013) begins to appear during the
first year in infants with ASD as they do in typically developing infants. Research
has suggested that these characteristic features of ASD consist of typical behav-
iors that persist beyond the normal and expected developmental timeframe, thus
becoming atypical (Chawarska et al., 2014). Stereotyped body movements and re-
petitive actions with objects are common in all infants during the first year of life,
but when they endure with similar intensity past this age, they become less typical
(Elison et al., 2014; Loh et al., 2007). However, complexity exists in these time-
lines as well, as the various expressions of behavior do not proceed in a uniform
fashion, within either the social communication or repetitive behavior domains
(Elison et al., 2014; Ozonoff et al., 2008).
This increasing awareness of the early developmental picture in infants and
toddlers with ASD has resulted in revisions to the major diagnostic measures
(Gotham et al., 2007; Luyster et al., 2009) and the most recent diagnostic manual,
DSM-5 (APA, 2013). Although the impact of changes in diagnostic criteria from
DSM-IV to DSM-5 on the diagnosis of very young children with ASD is perhaps
6
not yet fully appreciated, several studies have shown some trends. It had long
been understood that, due to the extremely limited inclusion of infants and tod-
dlers in the field trials of DSM-IV, the diagnostic criteria developed at that time
were not entirely applicable to the youngest children (Chawarska et al., 2008).
However, the inherent flexibility of a polythetic diagnostic system was perhaps
advantageous for the diagnosis of very young children, as their symptoms are still
emerging in one area or another at the time of evaluation. Children diagnosed
under DSM-IV with PDD-NOS, which required fewer symptom criteria be met
than Autistic Disorder, might be especially at risk for not meeting criteria under
DSM-5 (Mandy et al., 2012). The main concern regarding the youngest children
with ASD is that they often do not (yet) exhibit the full set of symptoms seen in
older children. Indeed, in a small sample of children between 12 and 36 months
of age, 72% of those diagnosed with a PDD under DSM-IV did not meet ASD cri-
teria using DSM-5 (Mayes et al., 2013).
In DSM-5, changes included the removal of the age of onset criterion
(36 months); construction of two symptom domains (social interaction and com-
munication, plus restricted repetitive behavior) instead of the former triad, with
a monothetic approach to the social communication domain, requiring all three
symptom criteria to be met; specifications regarding the level of severity and im-
pairment; and an indication of whether the diagnosis is accompanied by intellec-
tual disability, language delays, any known medical or genetic conditions, or pre/
perinatal factors. Of all of these changes, the one most heavily addressed empir-
ically has been the shift from a three-domain syndrome to a two-domain syn-
drome and its implications for diagnostic inclusion of children.
One approach to comparing diagnostic models, including those upon which
DSM-IV and DSM-5 are based, examines the factor structure of symptoms.
Guthrie and colleagues (2013) tested the statistical fit of various diagnostic models
in a large group of toddlers with a clinical diagnosis of ASD between 12 and
30 months of age (mean age: 20 months). From the ADOS-2 (Autism Diagnostic
Observation Schedule-2nd edition) Toddler Module, 26 items were selected as re-
flecting the most relevant symptoms for a diagnosis. Data from the toddlers were
submitted to a series of confirmatory factor analyses, which revealed that autism
symptoms measured by this instrument were best organized into a two-factor
solution mirroring that of the DSM-5, in contrast to several other models. This is
perhaps not entirely surprising since diagnostic instruments were central in the
development of the new DSM-5 criteria (Jackson & Volkmar, 2019).
Another way to evaluate the fit of the new criteria is to apply them to the be-
havior profiles of children already clinically diagnosed with the disorder. In two
subcohorts of children under the age of 4 years who were previously diagnosed
with ASD using DSM-IV criteria, sensitivity using DSM-5 was high (0.98, 0.90).
However, specificity against other non-PDD disorders was fairly poor (0.53, 0.40)
(Huerta et al., 2012). Evidence of a DSM-5 symptom included any related ADOS
or ADI-R item with at least a score of 1, which signifies only mild impairment; this
may explain the relatively low specificity. When symptoms were required to be re-
ported by both informants, sensitivity dropped slightly, but specificity improved.
7
However, the age distribution of these cohorts was not reported, so it is unclear
how young some of these children were. While an accounting of why some chil-
dren were missed under DSM-5 (i.e., failure to meet social communication cri-
teria vs. failure to meet RRBIA criteria) was provided for the entire cohort, which
was populated mainly by older children, it was not reported for young subsets of
the sample. Thus, the possible effects of the stricter RRBIA category requirements
and the monothetic nature of the social communication category were not ad-
dressed for very young children in particular.
In young children under the age of 3 years with a mean age of 26 months,
Barton and colleagues (2013) reported that the new DSM-5 criteria were less able
to identify cases of ASD than in the previous study by Huerta and colleagues
(2012), with a sensitivity of 0.84, and with similar specificity (0.55). The authors
tested several variations of the diagnostic criteria for these youngest children. The
strategy of relaxing the repetitive behavior criteria from two of four items to one
of four items provided the best solution in terms of sensitivity/specificity tradeoff
(Barton et al., 2013). These authors discussed a fundamental issue concerning
the mapping of symptoms in toddlers onto the DSM-5 criteria, not an entirely
straightforward task. Indeed, in providing a full explication of the mapping of
specific symptoms onto the DSM-5 criteria between their own study and that of
Huerta et al. (2012), discrepancies in the mappings were revealed. If, even among
experts in the field, there is disagreement over which symptom belongs to which
category, the likelihood of clinicians and researchers adopting “idiosyncratic un-
derstanding” (Barton et al., 2013) and application of symptom mapping in tod-
dlers is high.
One perhaps unintended consequence of the new conventions for those under
the age of 3 years may involve the application of the severity specifier to very young
children. DSM-5 introduced the fourth criterion, requiring that symptoms “cause
clinically significant impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas
of current functioning” (APA, 2013, p. 50). For toddlers, the most relevant area of
functioning is in the domain of adaptive behavior. However, their level of adaptive
functioning may be somewhat more difficult to gauge than that of older children,
as the majority of their time is often spent living in environments with supportive
parents or caregivers, obviating the need to adjust or conform to other people or
environments. One study of toddlers (age 20–47 months) utilized the Vineland
Adaptive Behavior Scales-II (Sparrow et al., 2005) to determine the level of adap-
tive impairment. Indeed, while the vast majority of a group of young children (age
20–47 months) with DSM-IV-diagnosed ASD met the mild impairment threshold
on the Vineland (1 SD below the mean), a substantial proportion of toddlers did
not meet the medium or severe thresholds (Zander & Bölte, 2015). Because there
is no convention for the definition of impairment in either the DSM-5 or in the
field in general, caution in strictly applying the impairment criterion is warranted.
This is particularly true in the case of very young children who all require sup-
port from parents and caregivers, regardless of diagnosis. These studies and others
provided a reason for some concern about very young children with ASD being
adequately identified using DSM-5. The revisions to the diagnostic criteria and
8
structure are likely to impact the composition of the autism spectrum, the amount
of information included in diagnostic reports, and certainly, access to services in
the youngest children with ASD whose symptoms are still in the process of fully
emerging (McPartland & Dawson, 2014).
Gender Issues
Bearing in mind that the diagnostic criteria in use are derived from predomi-
nantly clinical descriptions of boys, the female phenotype has been incompletely
evaluated. Simply put, there is a tacit assumption that diagnostic criteria are ag-
nostic to gender. Indeed, it has been shown that compared to males, females with
ASD require more severe symptoms and greater behavioral and cognitive impair-
ments to receive the diagnosis (Dworzynski et al., 2012). Females are noted to
present with more “internalizing” symptoms than their male counterparts, who
conversely present with more “externalizing” symptoms, which will automatically
alert them to mental health services (Mandy et al., 2012). Moreover, females per-
haps resort to “camouflaging” or “pretending to be normal” more than their male
counterparts, another reason that they may present late (Bargiela et al., 2016).
Consequently, females are likely to be diagnosed later than males. Their diagnosis
has been overlooked during their childhood, and adult services will need to be
alert to the need to effectively screen and diagnose this group. We discuss this
issue in more detail subsequently.
The heterogeneity of symptoms and patterns of onset in individuals with ASD
greatly impacts the time of diagnosis and how well the usual diagnostic instru-
ments assist in the clinical judgment of a diagnosis. Gender issues have, for
society at large, more and more attention over the last years. For ASD, the long-
standing view of male predominance (particularly among the more cognitively
able) has been increasingly questioned (Becker, 2012; Constantino & Charman,
2012; Haney, 2016).
1
Over the past 20 years, findings related to sex differences in ASD have ranged
from revealing sex-specific patterns in behavior and development to reports of
minimal differences between sexes or sex differences that mirror the sex differ-
ences observed in typically developing children. The most consistent finding re-
lated to sex differences is the higher male prevalence. Fombonne (2003) reported
a prevalence ratio of 4.3:1 to 5.5:1 across studies, whereas a recent study showed
a corrected male-to-female ratio ranging between 3.1:1 and 4.3:1 (Loomes et al.,
2017). These estimates vary when controlling for IQ and have been reported to
be 5.75:1 in the normal IQ range and 1.9:1 in children with intellectual disability
(IQ < 70) (Baird et al., 2006; Kim et al., 2011). Although the causal mechanisms
of this predominantly high male-female ratio in ASD and sex differences in beha-
vior and development are widely debated and researched in the current literature,
several theories have been proposed to explain their existence. One of them is
that females need a greater symptom load to receive an ASD diagnosis (Volkmar
et al., 1993), while others have proposed that there exists a female protective effect
(Robinson et al., 2013). As highlighted in multiple studies, females with ASD have
been reported to exhibit lower levels of RRBIAs than males with ASD (Charman
et al., 2017; Frazier et al., 2013), which could be considered related to external-
izing behaviors. Males tend to score higher on indices measuring the externali-
zation of behavior problems, whereas females score higher on indices measuring
internalizing symptoms (Bolte et al., 2011; Hattier et al., 2011; Mandy et al., 2012;
Solomon et al., 2012; Szatmari et al., 2011). Lower levels of sensory issues, better
joint attention (Oien et al., 2017) and less social avoidance (Oien et al., 2018) could
be consistent with findings of better social skills (Chawarska et al., 2016), fewer
RRBIAs (Frazier et al., 2013; Mandy et al., 2012), and less disruptive behaviors
(Dworzynski et al., 2012), contributing to less pronounced ASD symptoms in fe-
males, resulting in a later age of diagnosis or a failure to meet the cutoff criteria
for a diagnosis at all. Furthermore, this finding could indicate that the presence of
impairments in language, motor development, or greater ASD symptom severity
is necessary for females to meet the cutoff on, for example, diagnostic instru-
ments. This could indicate that females with more complex language abilities and
fewer core symptoms are diagnosed significantly later than males (Lai et al., 2012;
Salomone et al., 2015).
Cultural Issues
Until recently, the vast majority of ASD studies has been conducted in Western
and highly developed countries. With the growing awareness of autism as a
worldwide phenomenon, issues of cultural differences in diagnostic expres-
sion, diagnostic practice, and intervention have emerged as an important issue.
Unfortunately, this topic has been the focus, as yet, of relatively little work (see
Freeth et al., 2014). In their excellent review, Freeth and colleagues (Freeth et al.,
2014) have noted some of the more obvious differences in ways symptoms/diag-
nostic criteria might be experienced or reported, for example, relative to things
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