Asperger Syndrome

Asperger syndrome was a diagnostic category for a developmental condition marked by significant difficulty with social interaction and nonverbal communication alongside restricted, repetitive patterns of behavior and interests, occurring without the language or cognitive delay seen in other forms of autism. First described by Hans Asperger in 1944 and named by Lorna Wing in 1976, it entered the ICD-10 around 1990 and the DSM-IV in 1994 before being folded into the single diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder in the DSM-5 in 2013 and the ICD-11 in 2022. As of 2015 an estimated 37.2 million people worldwide, about 0.51 percent of the population, were affected under the earlier diagnostic framework. People with the condition were often described as socially active but unusual in style, reaching out to others while missing many of the unspoken rules of interaction.