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Comment by efavdb | Hacker News Reader

would you mind answering a couple questions? I'm very curiuous:

Have autism rates increased recently (last few decades)?

If so, what are the best theories for why?

The book “Neurotribes” goes into this in great detail. The number of diagnoses have increased, primarily due to a widening of the criteria used to diagnose autism as the DSM [1] has gone from version 3 to 5. In the early days of autism research, it used to be necessary to meet multiple criteria (i.e. profound social withdrawal, language peculiarities such as echolalia, resistance to change, repetitive behaviors, etc., all occurring in very early childhood). Today, it’s possible to receive a diagnosis in adulthood, and to do so while meeting criteria across fewer of the above domains.

This widening has multiple causes, not the least of which was an attempt to help parents of autistic children access parenting resources they otherwise couldn’t without a diagnosis in-hand.

1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diagnostic_and_Statistical_M...

> widening of the criteria used to diagnose

Seeing some autism influencers on social media, I'm reminded that every childhood friend I ever had was autistic.

The most recent episode of the podcast Science Vs explored this in detail: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/autism-the-real-reason...

The rise in autism rates (5x over the last 25 years) is almost entirely explained by changes in how autism is defined, diagnosed, and detected. Not by an actual surge in underlying cases or any specific environmental trigger like vaccines, air pollution, heavy metals, plastics, or screen time.

I just don't believe that based purely on my personal experience. I've been around many many people and in the last 15-20 years the amount of people with autism has exploded. It was very rare 30 years ago in my area, the occasional led exposure here, farm chemicals there... But now it's seemingly every 10th house that has someone that is nonverbal.

I'm all for papers and science but only if it matches the real world.

One of the largest reasons is probably we're just looking more. It's a relatively new diagnosis, just 50 years ago it'd just be "oh yeah Uncle Joe is a little weird he only eats hotdogs and knows everything ever about trains".

There are severe cases of non verbal children etc

I'm not 100% sure what you're saying. Yes there are obvious cases like but those instances also used to just get called other things before we figured out autism as a distinct disease and it became widespread knowledge. There's no field in the data that gives us (for lack of a better term) the level of autism for people getting that diagnosis over time and we're recognizing more and more things as being on the spectrum of autism as time goes on which really just feeds back into the "there's more because we're finding/labelling more people as autistic" hypothesis.

Yes, and 50 years ago, those high-support-needs children would be the only people diagnosed as autistic, unlike today.

Ah.. like Joe Rogan, you're "just asking questions".

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