Special Issue on the Topic of Autism Spectrum Disorder (original) (raw)

For this first special issue of the Scandinavian Journal of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and Psychology (SJCAPP), we invited authors to submit papers about autism spectrum disorder (ASD). The topics of the final accepted manuscripts include the replication of some previous findings as well as new information in understudied areas. One important and inadequately studied area is gender differences in the presentation of ASD (1). Some investigators have expressed concerns that high-functioning girls with ASD may be underidentified as a result of differences in their symptom presentation (1-3), and sex differences in ASD symptom presentation have also been suggested by some studies of lower-functioning individuals (4). Because the type and severity of specific ASD-related behaviors may be different in females with ASD as compared with males with ASD-for example, restricted-repetitive behaviors (RRBs) may be less severe in girls-it has been suggested that new assessment methods are needed to detect the types of ASD symptoms that most commonly occur in females (1-3). In the current special issue, Nguyen and Ronald (5) compare ASD symptom presentation and other characteristics of low-functioning girls with ASD (n = 27) with those of typically developing (TD) girls (n = 17) and also with those of low-functioning boys with ASD (n = 27). The TD girl group was younger (mean age, 10 years) than the other two groups (mean ages, 15 years and 14 years for girls and boys, respectively) because the ASD groups had relatively low IQs and groups were matched for mental age. The authors found the ASD symptom presentation of low-functioning boys and girls with ASD to be largely similar, but the data do show