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"Diagnostic Criteria of Asperger's Syndrome" from ICD-10 (World Health Organization, 1993).

(reprinted from Tony Attwood, Asperger's Syndrome: A Guide for Parents and Professionals, pp. 200-1.)

A. There is no clinically significant general delay in spoken or receptive language or cognitive development. Diagnosis requires that single words should have developed by 2 years of age or earlier and that communicative phrases used by 3 years of age or earlier. Self-help skills, adaptive behavior, and curiosity about the environment during the first 3 years should be at a level consistent with normal intellectual development. However, motor milestones may be somewhat delayed and motor clumsiness is usual (although not a necessary feature). Isolated social skills, often related to abnormal preoccupations, are common, but are not required for diagnosis.

B. Qualitative abnormalities in reciprocal social interaction are manifest in at least two of the following areas:

  1. failure adequately to use eye-to-eye gaze, facial expression, body posture, and gesture to regulate social interaction;
  2. failure to develop (in a manner appropriate to mental age, and despite ample opportunities) peer relationships that involve a mutual sharing of interests, activities, and emotions;
  3. lack of socio-emotional reciprocity as shown by an impairment or deviant response to other people's emotions; or lack of modulation of behavior according to social context; or a weak integration of social, emotional and communicative behavior;
  4. lack of spontaneous seeking to share enjoyment, interests, or achievements with other people (e.g., a lack of showing, bringing, or pointing out to other people objects of interest to the individual).

C. The individual exhibits an unusually intense, circumscribed interest or restricted, repetitive and stereotyped patterns of behavior, interests, and activities manifest in at least one of the following areas:

  1. an encompassing preoccupation with stereotyped and restricted patterns of interest that are abnormal in content or focus; or one or more interests that are abnormal in their intensity and circumscribed nature though not in the content or focus;
  2. apparently compulsive adherence to specific, non-functional routines or rituals;
  3. stereotyped and repetitive motor mannerisms that involve either hand/finger flapping or twisting, or complex whole body movements;
  4. preoccupations with part-objects or non-functional elements of play materials (such as their color, the feel of their surface, or the noise/vibration that they generate).

D. The disorder is not attributable to the other varieties of pervasive development disorder: simple schizophrenia, schizo-typal disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, anankastic personality disorder, reactive and disinhibited attachment disorders of childhood.

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This page revised by Jim Devine, Wednesday, 3/21/2008 5:16:00 PM.