florrie

[florrie]

HOw many people have had psychometric tests eg iq tests or other cognitve strength and weakness tests as part of dx asd. I actually think these are extremely relevant and helped me understand my son autism and I later had tests done privately that confirmed i had similar cognitive processing problems. they don't appear to be being used on the nhs, althoug I suspect they may be being used sometime by educational psychologist in some children. I'm really interested in how much they are playing a part because ot is processing problems that give rise to symptoms and difficulties of asd.

[Malika]

Hi Florrie,

 

A complete psychometric test is very relevant some EP should be able to do it but in fact they just do a very little part of it which usualy does not give the complete picture and may be misleading only when those tests are complete and accurate as well as done by psychologist who understand the condition it will shed some light on strength and weakness of the child concerned, still some test should be revised and designed specialy for children with ASD or ASand I am not too sure such tests are widely accessible by professional.

 

May be somebody else will answer who knows better.

 

Malika.

[KarenT]

J had IQ and psychometric testing done as part of his assessment, but the overall results were inconclusive with insufficient evidence to dx AS at that time. Testing was done by a clinical psychologist based at the Child and Family Psychiatry Unit. I was told afterwards that I should use the results to ensure that J's academic needs are catered to, but no information as to how I should go about that. Nobody else seems to know either, and the psychologist no longer works at the dept.

 

Karen

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[florrie]

Thank you for information, I'm surprised that they aren'tused more often, my nephew was told he didn't have asd because he has empathy, even though he has all the usual obsessive interests and routines, communication problems and difficult behaviour and i can see he has some cognitive problems, but no assessment of that kind was done, the cognitive tests also tell whether you have commmunication problems, well that was what i was told by my s ons' pyschologist 9 years ago who was did in deptth tests and was doing research at the time and said J would never have had the tests done normally on the nhs, and therefore at that time would not have been dx.

 

All the experts who understand it inside out such asprofessor Gillberg etc seem to use cognitive tests as part of their understanding of asd.

[Malika]

Hi Florrie,

 

To my understanding empathie should not be the main factore to or not to give a DX of ASD as children can work it out in an intellectal way, beside I have read on a website from a mother of a child who has Fragile X that he has many caracteristics of autism except that he is very affectionate, personnaly I can see in my son (ASD) that he has empathie not necessarely at the right time or with the right priority but it is there but sometimes it is strong and sometimes it is weak, I think it can be very misleading anyway.

 

Malika.

[florrie]

I completely agree with you, i think one of the difficulties that isn't being understood is that asd people have difficulty communicating or expressing empathy rather than having any, also my autistic son definetly has empathy, and so do I , in fact Ifeel i actually have too much empathy, where I feel others suffering so acutely like my son's or animals, homeless people, mentally ill people etc but not normally the sorts of thing that are considered by NTs to be important eg, s abroken relatiionship etc. I think autistic people have empathy toward things they relate too in particular, actually I can't help feeling that the professionals who say autistic people have no empathy are usually the ones that have no empathy toward the difficulties face by asds.

[Zemanski]

Com has had these tests done twice and Dot once.

 

Both kids had them at the time of diagnosis; Dot's mismatch between her verbal comprehension and her phonemic awareness comes out at about 85 centiles (ie the size of the difference between the two scores) which clearly indicates a specific learning difficulty, in this case severe dyslexia.

 

For Com they were used to prove that he has no specific learning difficulties and that he was nowhere near reaching his potential - ie that his AS is the primary cause of his underachievement. The first time the consultant was trying to prove that there was nothing wrong with him at all but the mismatch between his cognitive scores and what he was achieving in school showed there was a problem. It didn't show what the problem was though.

 

Cognitive scores are not used to diagnose ASDs because cognition can be within the entire range for a child with ASD, ie IQ and ASD are not linked (except to give an indication of whether a diagnosis might be autism or AS). The pattern of scores can give hepful indicators but they are not necessary for diagnosis

 

What they are used for is to determine strengths and weaknesses so that needs can be met more appropriately, for example Com has a relative weakness in spelling so this was an area that support for literacy focused on.

 

They can also highlight the difference between receptive and expressive use of language which supports a diagnosis of pragmatic language difficulties which are associated with ASDs but again only as an indicator, normally this would then be investigated in more depth by a speech and language therapist.

 

One specific test is known to be associated with ASDs - block design - ASD children usually score highly on this relative to other areas. However, it is still only an indicator.

 

Both Com's assessments were free, one through CAMHS and the other through the Ed psych. Dot's was part of a private assessment at the dyslexia institute as the LEA would not assess her because she didn't meet the criteria even for school action.

 

lack of empathy is another of those generalisations - just because empathy isn't expressed by a person, or is expressed differently, doesn't mean they can't feel it but difficulty with the 'socially appropriate' expression of empathy is common in ASDs because it is seen to indicate a difficulty with understanding and responding to others.

 

Zemanski

[Malika]

Hi to all, <'>

 

Zemanski what you said is very relevant to H case he had some form of assesment from the EP and perform so well in everything from 83 to 98 per centile except in expressive language which was 49 and expressive language 78, but the EP test him only on single words and not on sentences or understanding stories because she was there to prove that H did not need any support, the strange thing at the SENDIST (appeal for statutory assesment) was that they did not accept the discrepancy between his high test result and a nearly inexistant progress as a prove that H was in need of more support. !!!!

 

My EPSEA rapresentative did argue the case in that light but according to them as far as he had made even little progress that was enough to show he did not need a further assesment.

The fact that H had social difficuties was put on my shoulder by the EP and the SENDIST jump on it saying that they prefered the EP report at the specialist report because it was more recent (5 months) and because more relevant to the education factor even the team who had DX H was absolutly appaled at the EP report however they all seem to be to worried to intervene in any way.

How is it possible to deny a statutory assesment to a child who has an obvious ASD DX just because of an EP report??

 

I would like to have some comments on this.

 

Malika.