Autism rates increasing, or simply better...

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diagnostic criteria? I think it could be both, but I certainly think the autism and asperger’s rates are increasing. It would be hard to argue against that in my opinion. Well enough about me, what do you all think?

if it were genetic I don't see how it could NOT be increasing.

Not to mention two completely NT parents are still capable of having autistic children.

If we equate Autism to Kanner's:

It has been increasing, it used to be 1 in 10,000, today it's 1 in 500. The diagnostic criteria from the DSM-III and the DSM-IV-TR aren't much different, and Kanner's criteria are very close to the former two.... Increased awareness by clinicians is a good start, as is increased awareness of HFA (remember the days when you had to be nonverbal or echolaliac and mentally ret*d as an adult to be diagnosed with Kanner's?).

That may be the reason, as simple as it is.

Now, the spectrum; well, that's a "new" thing, with Asperger's and PDD-NOS adding to the overall number. If you say these two prior are "Autism", then of course this is going to increase the numbers significantly.

Both. I think that access to mental health services in schools and communities has increased due to IDEA, 504, the ADA which means that children and young adults are more likely to be diagnosed than in the past. And as Daniel says, if AS is considered to be a form of autism, then rates are definitely going to increase.

If there is a positive correlation between paternal age and autism then our increasingly industrialized society which encourages men to become fathers later in life could definitely be contributing to the increase of autism. It would be interesting to see if rates of autism are as high in Mennonite and Amish groups or in indigenous cultures where men father children at an earlier age.

We're basically stealing kids from the "mentally ret*d", "attachment disorder", and "psychotic" categories. The number of kids needing special ed have remained constant all through the rise in autism diagnosis--though the number of kids diagnosed with milder PDDs, who might have slipped through the cracks before, is indeed increasing. However, since many adults with new PDD diagnoses have histories of diagnosis with various mental illnesses, it's safe to say the PDDs may be stealing patients from the "mentally ill" group, too.

I don't see the connection.

I don't know that it is necessarily "better" diagnostic criteria; there is still frequent misdiagnosis, and the existing criteria cover such a wide range of conditions that I think it makes it more confusing and weakens their identification and sense of validity. The expansion of the definition of Autism to include Asperger's, PDD-NOS and other variants will naturally bolster the numbers greatly. That being said, I do think that the numbers are on the rise... and while I do NOT ascribe to the vaccine theory in any way, there was an interesting study that found four common factors among those on the spectrum: pica, maternal fish consumption, oral antibiotic usage and adverse reactions to vaccinations*.

* http://www.eas.asu.edu/~autism/Research/Completed.html

...an interesting side observation, I thought.


M.

Increasing autism specialists+ASDs getting easier to recognise through better awareness+some overdiagnosis.

In my personal experience - growing up in the 1960s, my parents didn't even consider that there might be something about me that required diagnosis.

There is very likely some over-diagnosis these days, as awareness increases. But mostly, I think that our current culture allows it to be detected more often.

At the same time intellectual disability (mental retardation) is being diagnosed less often. There's a nice write up of it here:
http://photoninthedarkness.com/?p=158

A shift in diagnosis from MR to autism doesn't account for all of it, but it appears to be pretty significant.

Autistic children grow up to be autistic adults.. if they reproduce there is a likelihood that their children will be autistic too. And so on.

Thanks for posting that. It was very enlightening to me.

The condition is probably not increasing in freguency but being diagnosed and observed much better than it once was, especially in urban school systems. As more and more money in the form of grants move towards study of the condition it will be that we see what appears to be more incidents but in reality it is just more reporting.

I don't think it is increasing. People are understanding it better which is leading to more people being diagnosed.

But, ah..., aren't most of the additional cases diagnosed with Autism (Kanner's) today simply people who don't have mental retardation and aren't nonverbal/echolaliac as adults? Kanner's started off with what is called "HFA" today, and then there was a shift which empathised what is called "LFA" for 30 or so years, and this "LFA" was what most people thought Autism had to be, so those with "HFA" would often go undiagnosed, or given another label like Schizophrenia in adolescence (not to mention that people with AS were drowning in the open ocean with nothing helping them).

The fall of MR could be simply due to greater awareness of certain drugs that affect foetal development.