implicit emphasis on as as synonymous with autistic disorder in many places in the article we make statements which are based not on studies of as but rather of studies on people with various sorts of autism while many researchers consider as and hfa to be so similar that there is no point in even distinguishing between them there is at least a significant minority who have championed the continuing existence of as as a distinct diagnosis if we treat studies on persons who were diagnosed with autistic disorder as if they had been diagnosed with as we implicitly bias the article in favor of the one viewpoint so even though i happen to believe that as and hfa are the same in most important aspects i intend to go through this article and weed out the bias as may not be very well researched but there is not such a dearth of information that we are compelled to introduce large amounts of material on arguably different topics