My breakdown of the autism Princeton study... part 2

In my last post I talked about the research uncovering 4 pattern clusters in the autistic sample group, which people are calling "subtypes," and explained why using the term "subtype" is causing confusion...

(If you're interested in my explanation of that, you should go look for part 1. 🙂)

In this post, I'll share what the patterns clusters actually were and how they were grouped in the study. 

As I mentioned, there were 4. Two included developmental delays and two didn't...

Interestingly, the two that did have developmental delays made up less than 30% of the total autistic sample group.

This is highly significant if you think about the way autism has historically been identified and diagnosed.

Because 20 or 30 years ago, developmental delays were what led someone to look into autism in the first place. So back then, the prevalence of developmental delays was significantly higher in diagnosed children.

But now, they're only in about a third of autistic children.

(But that's a topic for another day.🙂)

For now, let's get into the features of the 4 pattern clusters identified in this study.

1. The first group, which represented ~37% of autistic individuals in the sample group, was called the "Social and Behavioral Challenges" group.

This group had noticeable social challenges and repetitive behaviors, but as I mentioned, generally did not have developmental delays.

They also found that this group was often diagnosed with co-occurring conditions like ADHD, anxiety, depression, OCD, etc.

2. The second group, which represented ~34% of the autistic sample group, was called the "Moderate Challenges" group.

I personally find this designation incredibly misleading because moderate usually means something in between mild and severe...

And I think the term does a significant disservice to people trying to understand how this group presents. But I digress.

The researchers noted that this group had all the core traits of autism, but that they were the least noticeable out of all the groups.

This group also did not have developmental delays or co-occurring psychiatric conditions.

Ok, now for the two groups that presented with developmental delays...

3. The third group, which represented ~19% of the autistic sample group, was called the "Mixed ASD with Developmental Delay" group. "Mixed" refers to how the core traits of their autism showed up.

This group didn't show signs of anxiety, depression or disruptive behaviors.

4. And finally, the last group identified, which represented ~10% of the autistic sample group, was called the "Broadly Affected" group. 

They found this group to have more extreme and wide-ranging challenges related to their core traits of autism.

They also found the Broadly Affected group to have co-occurring psychiatric conditions like anxiety, depression and mood dysregulation.

In addition to all the patterns I just mentioned, the researchers also identified distinct biological and genetic patterns within each group. But I'll save delving into that for another post because it's by far the most confusing part of the research.

Let me know if you found this breakdown helpful and if you want me to cover anything specific in this series as I create more content. 😊

And as always, if you like this type of content... follow for more.