Clinical Study Autism in the Faroe Islands: Diagnostic Stability from Childhood to Early Adult Life

• Main Authors: Helen Minnis, Christopher Gillberg
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Published: 2012
• Subjects: Faroe Islands
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.688.9792; http://theses.gla.ac.uk/5555/4/2013+Diagnostic+Stability+TSWJ.pdf

Copyright © 2013 Eva Kočovská et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Childhood autism or autism spectrum disorder (ASD) has been regarded as one of the most stable diagnostic categories applied to young children with psychiatric/developmental disorders. The stability over time of a diagnosis of ASD is theoretically interesting and important for various diagnostic and clinical reasons. We studied the diagnostic stability of ASD from childhood to early adulthood in the Faroe Islands: a total school age population sample (8–17-year-olds) was screened and diagnostically assessed for AD in 2002 and 2009. This paper compares both independent clinical diagnosis and Diagnostic Interview for Social and Communication Disorders (DISCO) algorithm diagnosis at two time points, separated by seven years.The stability of clinical ASD