Bosch’s Cases: a 40 years Follow-up of Patients with Infantile Autism and Asperger Syndrome

Only a handful of longitudinal case reports on autism spectrum disorders exist in the literature. In this study, we present the follow-up data on two subjects with infantile autism and one with Asperger syndrome over 40 years after initial diagnosis. Their childhood phenomenology had been described in detail in a historic monograph by Gerhard Bosch (1962, 1970). The trajectories of his three former patients were consistent with more recent larger scale empirical studies on outcome in autism and related disorders. While the two cases with core autism had poor outcomes compared to the person with Asperger syndrome, all three of them showed a highly stable symptomatology from childhood into adulthood. The study confirms the stability and validity of the diagnosis of autism over the years (German J Psychiatry 2004; 7:10-13).