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Comment by lenerdenator | Hacker News Reader

Honest question:

What does this really bring to the table as a diagnostic tool for autism?

By the time that you're evaluating gait, you're evaluating a lot of other things, too, since autism usually starts appearing during childhood. Obvious things, like trouble socializing, learning, and processing stimuli.

I'm not a doctor or involved in any sort of diagnosis, treatment, or curing of diseases or conditions, but given that the current head of the US Department of Health and Human Services is a whackjob when it comes to autism and other neurodivergent conditions, I don't see any benefit in offering a way to label people as this or that based on how they walk.

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I would call this study a limited data-point, rather than a conclusion.

Personally I'm more concerned with the definition of autism itself, which is so incredibly broad that it actually defies most generalisations. For any given symptom or characteristic there may be an autistic cohort in a vastly different part of the spectrum to whom it patently does not apply.

It's because the definition of autism isn't a collection of traits or symptoms; it's essentially defined by how other people experience you as opposed to how you experience the world, and there happens to be a lot of comorbidities, so to speak

The problem is, people love to take limited data points and turn them into conclusions.

I've had an autism assessment recently, and I did mention gait because toe walking was a bit of a meme for a while. The assessor did note it but it was only a footnote, they focused on the other questionnaire items.

I was recently diagnosed. They told me multiple times that it's very hard to diagnose an adult because we have so many coping mechanisms at a high level.

This is just one more tool they can use to help determine that diagnosis. Their tests/questions covered a lot of ground, with a large focus on things from childhood.

I think the research on this is not really about diagnosis tools, but about understanding autism. What even is this disorder that makes you have such wide effects as not being able to look people in the eyes to walking weird to even pooping weird? Why does it make you like some stuff more than other stuff, too?

Is it meant to be a diagnostic tool? I would have thought that we'd be more interested in A) helping people with a gait that messed up their feet and tendons, and knowing that this is a comorbidity for ASD, or B) understanding how gait works generally.

It seems like another clickbait headline in the spirt of: Easy-to-spot sign X that everyone can be checked without their consent maybe a sign of complicated disability Y

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