What Is Regressive Autism And How Can It Affect Your Child?

The 2013 edition of the diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders — the great big "manual" US healthcare professionals use to diagnose a wide range of neurodevelopmental, mood, personality, and other mental disorders — unified the multiple autism-related diagnoses that existed before into a single diagnosis of "autism spectrum disorder". 

Any person who meets the diagnostic criteria will now be diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder. This means that they'll have:

• "Persistent deficits in social communication and social interaction" — difficulty forming and maintaining social relationships, a hard time knowing how to approach someone socially, and unusual nonverbal communication like a dislike of eye contact and trouble interpeting facial expressions, for instance. 
• "Restricted , repetitive patterns of behavior, interests, or activities" — which can manifest as a strong need for sameness and routines, distress when faced with change, repetitive motor movements ("stimming"), and strong "special interests". It can also include hypersensitivity to textures, smells, sounds, and other stimuli, or on the other hand a reduced sensitivity.
• The symptoms have first to show up in childhood, but though autism symptoms often appear by toddlerhood, they may be missed as well, and it's still possible to be diagnosed with autism during adulthood. 
• The symptoms must have a significant impact on a person's life and daily functioning and shouldn't better be explained by some other condition. 

Autism spectrum disorder can be diagnosed with or without intellectual and language impairments and is further "sorted" into three levels of severity within the DSM-5. 

While the diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder does highlight that autism exists on a broad spectrum, all the possible manifestations covered in the previous incarnations of the DSM still exist — and it's still very much possible for a child to lose skills they initially acquired as they get older. 

What is 'regressive autism' or regression in an autistic child?

The fact that there's no one agreed-upon definition of what regression means makes it hard to define beyond this very general description. Some might consider the loss of just one word that a child used a few times regression, while others would only deem a situation in which a child loses most of their words after using them for a long time regressive. Regression can take place so suddenly that it's hard to miss, it be so gradual that it's actually not easily apparent at all. 

It's also important to note that, though regression in autism has been studied for a very long time now, there's still much scientists don't know about it — including what causes regression. 

The fact that regression often occurs around the same time children also receive important vaccinations may partly explain the persistent idea that immunizations can cause autism, but there is absolutely no reliable scientific evidence that vaccines play any role in inducing regression or autism itself. What is interesting, however, is the finding that many parents of autistic children who displayed symptoms of regression were themselves found to have autistic traits. This may suggest that genetics play a role in leading to regression. 

How can regression affect a child with autism spectrum disorder?

Parents will want to know that:

• A child may lose language skills or language skills and social skills — it's rare for social skills to be lost on their own. 
• Children who regress are more likely to have intellectual difficulties. 
• Most children who lose skills they previously had are boys.
• Where regression occurs, it's usually sometime during a child's second or third year of life. Around half of all parents already had developmental worries about their children before this period hit, however.
• It's rather unlikely that a child will go from using complete sentences to becoming completely nonverbal — the vast majority of children who go on to lose speech skills only used one-word phrases and had a limited vocabulary to start off with. 

Perhaps most importantly, regression doesn't necessarily predict a child's later development — and autistic children who go through periods of regression develop similarly to those who had symptoms from the get-go. 

Autistic children who show evidence of regression benefit from all the same sorts of treatments as others with autism, including behavioral therapies, occupational therapy, speech therapy, and where necessary, medications for co-occurring diagnoses such as epilepsy.