Autistics die a lot younger then the general population

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One of the central issues in life expectancy studies is the age bands of the samples used.

To illustrate this simply, imagine a sample group that studies people age 1 to age 80 for mortality rates - a sample you might take from the official death registration records. You write down the age of everyone who died in the past 20 years from that targeted registry.

You get an average age from this - say 45 years - that's the "mean" of your sample. So you then conclude that the average age of death is 45 years for that population; but you would be wrong.

You can see immediately the problem with that kind of extrapolation: there are likely to be far more deaths registered in the 60-80 years old group, than say the decade-in their-20s subgroup or younger members of the total sample; the mean is calculated from the total lived years of life divided by the number of participants, so if the sample was stacked with 'oldies' to begin with - and the average age was derived from studying all deaths registered within say ten years or whatever, you can see why the result would seem plausible though faulty.

Other variables too would undermine the assumptions, for example, discoveries in medicine made during those 20 years might lengthen the lives of the younger members of the sample, changing access to health care, housing and so on - all sorts of things would need to accounted for, even if the sample was drawn in a technically robust way.

So I hope younger members here don't read the article in the OP post and respond with alarm. (I'm still going strong as one of the older members in the 60+ group here!)

I went to the Asperger's Women's Association of Facebook and asked if it was true. One person said no, she was 70 and healthier than most other people the same age, and asked if I'd confused it with Down's Syndrome. I told her no.

I wasn't referring to your attitude at all.

I was referring to my mother's.

I'm just saying that having knowledge and clarity about yourself and your condition could lead to at least a certain amount of healing. Not having that knowledge leads to things getting worse, because you are not attending to what ails you.

Back to statistics. Before the seventies no one died with HFA. So any stats that exist are weighted heavily on the young side. Unknowing autistics who survive growing up have a pretty good chance of feathering their niche. Unless someone goes egg raiding with talk of autism.

There really wasn't much of a concept of HFA before the 1980s. And of Asperger's before the late 80's/early 90s. And even less of a concept of adults with HFA or with Asperger's until quite recently.

I would guess that the vast majority of older people within studies dealing with autistic people would probably have been diagnosed with Kanner's Autism when young, for that was the only autistic diagnosis until 1994, under the DSM-IV. Within the DSM III, which was revealed to the public in 1980, there was only one autistic diagnosis, "Infantile Autism," which translates to classic autism.

People diagnosed with HFA and Asperger's as children up to about 20 years ago are now about 40 years old at the most, meaning they were born around 1976.

Studies pertaining to lifespan amongst people on the present-day autistic spectrum would probably have to wait for at least another 20-30 more years, when the people born in 1976 would be 60-70 years old.

As it stands now, we are only assessing the lifespan of people with classic autism, it seems to me.

That's probably so, what you say.

But I don't believe in the inevitability of a reduced lifespan. I believe it's possible only.

Cross my fingers...but I believe you, Claradoon, will live at least thirty more years.

I'm dying young
It's better than dying old
Goodbye, cool world.

It's obvious, especially when one goes beyond the surface, that ASPartofme is a most faithful poster, and has NEVER done anything that remotely resembles provoking anybody.

To accuse him of being a troll is like accusing Adolf Hitler of liking Jews.

He takes great care in his posts, and is most considerate of everybody. I've never even seen him "utter" a cross word at anybody.

He has more restraint than I do.