| Popis: |
The terms “early intervention” and “Asperger syndrome (AS)” are not typically strung together as is the case for “early intervention and autism.” For example, a literature search using the terms early intervention and AS conducted across four major psychological and medical search engines (i.e., Psychinfo, Pubmed, Medline, Eric) in 2011 found a total of 76 citations. This means that only 76 articles used the terms early intervention and Asperger syndrome together in the article or book chapter. This number is in stark contrast to the 2,543 citations found by using the search terms early intervention and autism in the same health search engines over the same time period. The limited research found for early intervention and AS is most likely due to the fact that AS is recognized and diagnosed at a significantly older age compared to autism. A common interpretation of the term early intervention is the application of programs or services for children under the age of 5. In fact, “early” is now being known as interventions addressing the needs of infants and toddlers, specifically children under the age of 3 years. This reference to very young children is in response to the decrease in age in diagnosing classic autism. Autism is reliably diagnosed at 2 years of age (Palomo, Belinchon, & Ozonoff, 2006), and more recently, a number of studies have reported reliable diagnostic assessment measures used in infancy with the ability to diagnose infants after 9 months of age (Ozonoff et al., 2010). AS, on the other hand, has been found to be reliably diagnosed at 4–5 years of age, at the earliest, in controlled research studies (Mandell et al., 2010) but is more often diagnosed between 7 and 9 years of age within community service systems (Mandell et al., 2009; Shattuck et al., 2009). Many other studies have even reported first diagnoses of AS occurring in adolescents or even adulthood after previous alternative diagnoses (Tantam, 2003). Therefore, children with AS often have missed the so-called early intervention period when they become diagnosed and thus the term is not typically used. |
