Asperger’s disorder is one of the most pervasive development disorders that share a lot in common with autism. The main difference between the two is that there is no mental impairment as it happens to the sufferers of autism.

In reality, most Asperger’s patients are of normal to high intellectual range. A few of them are also gifted mathematically. Sufferers of autism do not communicate verbally; on the other hand asperger’s patients are unable to relate to others socially. Their conversation revolves around factual comments and mostly rattled off quite passionately. Their talks do not show any person-to-person relevance.

The Asperger patients will lapse into complete silence once they are short of their factual comments and show a noticeable inability to engage in any further social conversations. Recent researches have shown that there is a genetic component associated to Asperger’s.

This disorder can cause difficulties in family and interpersonal communications and in most cases there is a lack of any long term relationships. The Asperger patients cannot correctly interpret the facial expressions, body languages and simple language cues from others and therefore makes an intimate communication almost impossible.

There is a lot of literature available on Asperger’s that deals with treatment and diagnosis of the disorder in children. The same kind of material is not easily available for adults. This is mostly due to the fact that the origin of DSM-IV criteria for diagnosing Asperger is pretty recent.

This disorder was primarily recognised as a mere condition in the nineties. However, it was initially reported by a paediatrician from Austria called Hans Asperger in the year 1944.

Hans Asperger labelled this disorder as “autistic psychopathy”. To elaborate further the term “autism” refers to “self” and “psychopathy” as we all know is referred to “personality disease”.

Ironically, the paediatrician Asperger himself portrayed a lot of the characteristic behaviour patterns of the disorder that consists of poor ability to maintain long term relationships, weird movements, complete lack of empathy and intense absorption in specific interests.

This was separately diagnosed from autism and named “Asperger’s Disorder” only after his death and the disorder is rightly named after him.

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