Objectives: To determine which cognitive deficits are present in elderly with autism and to explore whether cognitive functions in elderly with autism remain stable, become more severe, or abate.
Methods: We compared the neuropsychological profile of 23 individuals with autism and 23 age and gender matched healthy controls aged between 51 and 83 years. A broad range of neuropsychological tasks were administered, with a focus on executive functioning and memory.
Results: In most cognitive domains, no deficits were present in elderly with autism. Deficits were only observed in attention, working memory, and fluency. Aging had differential effects for fluency and visual memory. Aging had a smaller impact on fluency performance in the autism group than in the control group, while it had a more profound effect on visual memory performance in the autism group.
Conclusions: We provide novel evidence that elderly with autism have subtle neuropsychological deficits. Moreover, it seems that developmental trajectories are different between elderly with and without autism in particular cognitive domains. While parallel development has been observed in the majority of cognitive domains, there is also evidence for a safeguard hypothesis (abating deficits) and a double jeopardy hypothesis (increasing severity of deficits) of aging in autism depending on the cognitive domain under study. The current findings show that knowledge regarding autism based on studies in childhood and adulthood cannot be translated directly to elderly with autism as different deficits are present depending of the age of individual with autism.
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