1 in 77 children have autism in Utah?
-->

Here we go again. Yet another post on the epidemiology of autism spectrum conditions hot on the heels of the recent adult estimates. This post relates to this paper: Changes in the administrative prevalence of autism spectrum disorders.. published in JADD.

I don't have the full-text paper yet but the abstract does provide some interesting snippets of information. The main findings:
  • Based on administrative records, the prevalence of autism in Utah changed from 2002 to 2008 to the order of a 100% increase in the numbers of cases. Note that this was prevalence not incidence.
  • In 2008, 1 in 77 children aged 8 were identified with an autism spectrum disorder (ASD).
  • For many, diagnosis as identified by health records didn't necessarily mean that children held a 'special education classification'. Indeed, most diagnoses were detected from health records.
Utah is pretty unique in that it has been monitoring autism rates for quite a while. Indeed, the last analysis by some of the same author group up until 2002 suggested an autism prevalence in 8-year olds of 1 in 133 in Utah. Further back and the prevalence in the 1980s was suggested to be 1 in 2,500 (although based on DSM-III criteria).

I will perhaps need to look at the contents of this latest paper in more detail before any firm conclusions are drawn.

Comments 0


EmoticonEmoticon

:)
:(
=(
^_^
:D
=D
-_-
|o|
@@
;)
(y)
:-d
:p
<3
(>o<)