Autism Clusters Tied to College-Educated Parents

'He notes that the results could reveal something as simple as a higher level of autism awareness among highly educated people. "At least in part, the more you are educated, the more you might readily recognize the symptoms of autism and push for a proper diagnosis," Gerhardt told Discovery News.'

This seems like a key point of this article, yet it was mentioned in an offhand way at the bottom. Must be hard to make a good 'story' out of it otherwise.

Seems to be an issue of identification more than causation.

People with more education are aware of things like autism more in their children, have higher salaries, better jobs, health insurance, etc...

All of this would lead to them actually identifying something as being wrong with their children and them taking them to a doctor for diagnosis.

Poorer parents without the education background or money would potentially just think, "that's the way kids are" or even if they recognized it, they might not have the money to take them to the doctor for diagnosis.

And finally, wealthier people seem to have trends for what they blame the problems of childhood on. Some level of this outbreak of autism is likely parents going to their doctor and saying, "my child is autistic- right?" just as they were doing with ADD years ago. Moreso, the doctors are able to provide prescriptions ($$) and additional visits ($$) to people that have some illness.

Why would they correlate it with level of education?

Why not the obvious fact that highly-educated functioning autistic people often have even more autistic children?

This clustering is not really news--it's been noticed for years. One possible explanation is "assortative mating".

The theory is that geeks marrying other geeks raises the likelihood of having hyper-geeks as offspring, and today it's much easier/more likely for geeks to meet and breed with one another than it was in the past.