Sat in on Ds ADOS assessment - very interesting, trying to make sense of it. Can anyone assist?

[Surrealistrhinoceros]

Hi all. DS (6) had his ADOS assessment today. He has a number of social/behavioural issues which they felt might have a relationship to ASD but we've gone into this with vibes of 'we think he probably isn't ASD but let's do the assessment and it will give us a view of his strengths and weaknesses'. Having sat in on the assessment it was intriguing - he flew some tasks and to my eye did much less well on others.

Does anyone whose child had an ADOs at a similar age know what they are looking for at 6 and what DS might have demonstrated or not?

DS was flawless on demonstrating tooth brushing to an alien. No problem with imaginary brush etc. he seemed okay with putting the blocks in the box and asking for more though I noticed him not making much if any eye contact. He obligingly called over to me to look at what he'd done and how good it was :) Looked at a picture of a town and said it was a town, identified people walking dogs etc. could identify basic facial expressions in a story book - sad, scared, happy etc. whatever that thing where you out your hands in the pins is he loved it. Demonstrated while he was at it some good non verbals with me - he told the tester something that obviously wasn't right while grinning at me :)

On the other hand he was rubbish at making up a story with toys ( to my surprise) and needed loads of prompting to do anything with them. He didn't have any idea about what a friend was and told the tester he 'has no friends' - went on when prompted to identify one lad. Not a chance of telling the story from a picture book - a few comments with heavy prompting. Was an enormous blank when asked what we did at Christmas. Didn't show much empathy in response to the testers story about her dog which had been locked in a garage for 2 days. Did make up a story with five objects but I thought it owed quite a lot to the testers demonstration.

My guess is that he's got all the baseline things there and we won't get an ASD diagnosis, but he is showing quite a deficit in the more subtle elements of social understanding which would be useful to have documented. I may have read the test and DS all wrong though. Id be really interested in others experiences. Appointment Monday but formal feedback not till dec 19th which seems a long while to wait!

Sorry I can't help any but thats really interesting..I coudn't sit in on my Ds's assessment (not sure if thats because he is older 7+ or because I am a PITA ). All I know is that when the assessor started to be an alien he wasn't having any of it, said he didn't want to play that! So not sure what that would say to anyone , and he played with foil??

bump....i'm interested

DS had his ADOS at 4 so I think some of the exercises would have been adjusted for age difference, but some of it sounds familiar - especially the flying through some bits . We ended up being just under the threshold for ASD and have a dx of social communication disorder or delay, so very interested to hear how you get on, sounds like you may be similar or HFA (not that I'm dxing, but you know what I mean!).

As DS gets older - he's 7 now - it's becoming so much clearer that there's this 'hole' where the social understanding should be. Like for his reading SAT he is bang in the middle apart from inference where he falls off the chart. So they read about George leaving home with an umbrella and they're asked what sort of weather is George expecting - for DS that's just a crazy question, how can he know what George is thinking?

I was talking to another parent of an un-dx'd child yesterday who is on the list for ADOS and one thing I said to her is that in our area it's only used for borderline/HFA cases, ie those cases where it's not 'obvious'. We were both wondering if there was any national figures on what dx's/ no dx's came out of ADOS, anyone any ideas?

Thank you, that is really interesting. I certainly wasn't wanting an Internet dx don't worry! Just interested to get a feel for what the different task are getting at and how children might be expected to react.

I don't know in what circumstances they do ADOS here. May be also if it's borderline as I got the impression that if it's barn door the paed can diagnose directly. Im interested in your DS diagnosis as I think we may well be in similar territory and it would be nice to have some label that says in minimal words 'this is the stuff he finds difficult'. Current one 'attachment difficulties' tends to need several paragraphs of explanation

Many thanks, I'll let you know how we get on!

If you think of the typical spikey autism profile on a graph, my DS would have exactly the same shape but just sit underneath the levels he needs for an ASD dx, iyswim.

I do hear of people getting 'autistic traits' as a dx, not sure how helpful that is in the fight for resources most of our parents go through.

The other thing is take someone with you if you can for the feedback and not DS if possible - it's very detailed and you need to listen. I can't remember a lot of it as I was in a bit of a daze.

My DS was also flawless at demonstrating toothbrushing to an alien.....I thought he did a great job - then in the report it said he scored in that aspect because his account was too detailed