The AS person has often spent an inordinate amount of time fixated on one particular (often peculiar) topic, and when that person is in a social environment, he or she tends to ramble on about the topic and that one-sided rambling is more important to that AS person than any other activity in a social setting, Woodbury-Smith writes on page 4. According to Woodbury-Smith, as the AS person gets older, the tendency to focus obsessively on one particular topic is increased, "…and they can be debilitating in terms of frequency of engagement as well as degree of distress that they cause the person and their family" (Woodbury-Smith, 2009, p. 4).
The "gold standard" as far as a diagnostic approach to determining autism vs. AS is through use of ADI-R (based on autism interviews) and of ADOS ("autism diagnostic observation scale"). The ADI-R amounts to a "semi-structured interview" between a person...
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