I'm a middle-aged adult now, but as a child I had mild autistic traits. Socio-economics, along with 1980's medicine, meant it was never picked up. I wonder if s

I'm a middle-aged adult now, but as a child I had mild autistic traits. Socio-economics, along with 1980's medicine, meant it was never picked up. I wonder if selection methods based entirely around childhood diagnosis may miss certain sub-groups. Author, what about the so-called 'savant' type of autistic person? Or even the anecdotal 'high functioning, high IQ' sub-group? Did your study find any evidence of these? It took until well into my 30's before my autistic traits heavily impacted my life. Looking back, I realised there had been a gradual snowball effect of oppressive environmental factors, incrementally pushing me further and further into "an autistic corner" - starting from that initial seed of childhood traits, but with the outcomes seeming as much developmental as genetic. Which, as an aside, seems to revolve as much around how other people (the world at large) treat the individual, as around factors internal to the autistic person themselves.