ASD and Dyspraxia.

[shimmerysilverglitter]

Are these two seperate diagnoses?

If a child is ASD would you pursue a diagnosis for dyspraxia or does it all just fall under the same umbrella?

Thanks.

By brother is diagnosed with both. He got the dyspraxia diagnosis years before the asd one.

Thank you, can you tell me a bit more about dyspraxia please?

Ds is HFA but has real difficulties with his fine motor skills, co-ordination for riding a bike etc (still can't without stabilisers at aged 7). I know a lot of ASD kids do but it seems to go further. He still has to be prompted to dress himself and in what order, if his clothing becomes disarrayed he could not begin to correct it. One time at school he took his trousers off in the toilet to go to the loo and the became inside out as he did it, he could not get them back on and stayed in the toilet for ages as he couldnt get dressed again and no-one to ask , he was 6 at the time.

Thanks for any information.

Although there is some cross-over, they are definitely different. My DS is dx dyspraxia with a ? ASD. He ticked all the boxes with dyspraxia, but only a few additional ones on the ASD side - too few to confirm apparently.
I think sometimes it is easier to spot the physical differences in age appropriate behaviour than the social ones.

I have both.

What follows is my own viewpoint and generalised bits from what I read.

There's a lot of confusion about diagnostic bits for ASD versus dyspraxia.

Because ASD used to be thought of only as "youngish boys with behavioural challenges who have a low IQ and little use of language", a reasonable number of people who have both ASD and dyspraxia got misdiagnosed as just having dyspraxia. People really didn't realise that 90% of people on the autism spectrum don't match that original description. Or that those things are nothing to do with autism but are separate disabilities.

So dyspraxia and the real autism symptoms got so mixed up that we ended up with a lot of autism traits listed as 'dyspraxic'.

In very basic terms,

Dyspraxia = fairly extreme physical clumsiness and lack of co-ordination.

Autism = social clumsiness and extreme need for predictability from one minute to the next, plus often sensory issues as well.

I find it confusing too. My DS has a photographic memory. Who can tell how this developed? An unexplained reliance on knowing everything about a certain subject - echolalia from parents - or to hide the fact that writing wasn't happening? His memory developed way before mark making skills as such, but physically OT has improved his writing skills.
There still seem so many blurry lines between the 2.