Guess the number of comments @ NJ.COM on "Autism continues to climb, with NJ rates now the highest"

[Spider Jerusalem]

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A new study suggests that changes to autism diagnosis criteria may be more to blame for rising rates of the developmental disorder than anything else.

Since the 1960s, autism prevalence rates have skyrocketed from 4 in 10,000 children to a current reported rate of 1 in 88. The reason behind the rise, however, has remained unclear.

Now researchers are shedding new light on the trend by applying current diagnostic criteria to data from a 1980s study on autism prevalence in what’s believed to be a first-of-its-kind analysis.

The original study, published in 1989, looked at hundreds of Utah residents ages 3 to 25 who were suspected to have autism. Clinicians used DSM-III criteria to assess individuals as “diagnosed autistic” or “diagnosed not autistic” and ultimately found an autism prevalence rate of 4 in 10,000 in Utah at that time.

But when a research team from the University of Utah applied current diagnostic criteria from the DSM-IV-TR to records from participants in the two-decades-old study, they found that most who were deemed to be autism-free at that time would receive the label today.

http://www.disabilityscoop.com/2012/06/29/autism-surge-analysis/15957/

Many studies look at the prevalence of autism, akin to taking a snapshot of the number of diagnoses in a given population. The new study instead examined the disorder’s incidence, or newly reported diagnoses, each year.

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Better diagnostic practices may explain these large hikes in incidence, says Maureen Durkin, professor of population health sciences and pediatrics at the University of Wisconsin in Madison.

“There’s much more awareness of autism,” say Durkin, who was not involved in the study. “There’s much more screening going on. And the newer generation of clinicians are being trained in this so they are more likely to see it.”

This increased attention to autism and its symptoms may also explain the rise in diagnoses of teenagers and adults.

An age-stratified analysis shows that children between the ages of 4 and 13 make up about 63 percent of the new autism cases. The fastest acceleration in new cases is in those diagnosed between 14 and 20 years of age.

Individuals diagnosed between 21 and 65 years of age account for about 9 percent of the new cases — but their proportion also significantly increased over the time frame of the study. Like girls, many of the adults are diagnosed with higher-functioning forms of autism, such as Asperger syndrome and PDD-NOS.

https://sfari.org/news-and-opinion/news/2014/rising-awareness-may-explain-spike-in-autism-diagnoses