The autistic spectrum.

simple practical skills and social adaptation from early childhood and that abnormalities were recognisable from the second year of life. Many clinicians diagnose on their interpretation of Asperger’s clinical descriptions, rather than insisting on normal development before 3 years in the areas mentioned. In this article, a simple system of subgrouping based solely on a description of the type of social impairment will be used, which avoids the confusion inherent in trying to identify the named syndromes. This simple subgrouping has proved helpful in clinical practice even though the groups are no more sharply differentiated and permanent than in any other existing method of classification in the specialty.