Ebony Holliday, PhD, assistant director of Community Programs at Kennedy Krieger Institute’s Center for Autism Services, Science and Innovation (CASSI), discusses how co-occurring conditions like ADHD and anxiety disorder can muddy the waters for getting a proper autism diagnosis and what families can do to ensure diagnostic clarification.
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Transcript
Co-occurring conditions can be quite common in autistic individuals and especially students as we’re talking about school age students as well. So that might be things like a DHD, so attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. It could be anxiety disorder disorders, it could be other mood or other emotional regulation disorders as well. So there might be some shared characteristics that may delay certain diagnoses. There may be some of those characteristics that might take over diagnoses, and so there may be difficulty with what we call diagnostic clarification. And so sometimes that might lead to a diagnostic odyssey at times where families and parents and individuals are seeing multiple providers and to be able to really get that clarity on diagnosis, on what presenting conditions or difficulties might be like.