Steadman defines a disorder as a disturbance of function, structure, or both resulting from a genetic or embryologic failure in development. This is an extremely important point because when we, as doctors, think about a disorder, we're saying something is wrong.
Syndrome is merely a group of signs and symptoms.
Obviously, disorders as well as diseases can create symptom complexes that we call a syndrome. The trouble here is that a lot of people are seeing autism when what they're really looking at is a different disease process. A disturbance of function, structure, or both, resulting from a genetic or embryologic failure in development or from exogenous factors such as poison, trauma, or disease. The aggregate of signs and symptoms associated with any morbid process, and constituting together the picture of the disease. See also disease.