Childhood diagnosis rates continue to rise

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One in 31 children in the United States are diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder by their 8th birthday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported Tuesday.

The finding, based on an analysis of medical records from 2022, reflects a dramatic rise in autism over the past two decades. Previous CDC reports showed that 1 in 54 8-year-olds had been diagnosed with autism in 2016. In 2000, it was 1 in 150.

“The most striking piece of this is how unbelievably common presentations of autism are,” said Zachary Warren, an author of the new report.

Warren, also the executive director of the Vanderbilt Kennedy Center’s Treatment and Research Institute for Autism Spectrum Disorders (TRIAD) in Nashville, Tennessee, largely attributed the increases to improvements in detecting the developmental disorder.

Doctors are better than ever at identifying autism, with awareness at an all-time high. “Without a doubt, we’ve become exceptionally efficient in this surveillance work,” Warren said.

What other factors could be causing the rise in autism?
Answers are both inconclusive and wildly complicated. Potential causes have been scrutinized for decades, and there doesn’t seem to be a single smoking gun. The leading theory lies in genetics.

“We have pretty compelling data that there are causes of autism, not a single cause,” Warren said. “We may have hundreds, if not 1000s, of different neurogenetic factors that influence presentations of autism.”

The CDC study also looked at autism diagnoses among 4-year-olds, estimated to be 1 in 34 in 2022.

Boys were three times more likely than girls to be diagnosed with autism. Diagnoses were also more common among Black and Hispanic children compared with white children.

‘Autism Epidemic Runs Rampant,’ New Data Shows 1 in 31 Children Afflicted
WASHINGTON, DC—APRIL 15, 2025—Autism prevalence in the U.S. has increased from 1 in 36 children to 1 in 31, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) latest Autism and Developmental Disabilities Monitoring (ADDM) Network survey published today in CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, opens in a new tab.

“The autism epidemic is running rampant,” said U.S. Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. “One in 31 American children born in 2014 are disabled by autism. That’s up significantly from two years earlier and nearly five times higher than when the CDC first started running autism surveys in children born in 1992, opens in a new tab. Prevalence for boys is an astounding 1 in 20 and in California it’s 1 in 12.5.”

“President Trump has tasked me with identifying the root causes of the childhood chronic disease epidemic -- including autism,” Secretary Kennedy continued. “We are assembling teams of world-class scientists to focus research on the origins of the epidemic, and we expect to begin to have answers by September.”

The new ADDM report was conducted in 2022 across 16 sites in the U.S. and surveyed children aged 8 years born in 2014. This latest autism prevalence is 4.8 times higher than in the first ADDM survey 22 years ago, when prevalence was 1 in 150 children.

The increase in autism spectrum disorder (ASD) prevalence cannot be solely attributed to the expansion of diagnoses to include higher functioning children. On the contrary, the percentage of ASD cases with higher IQs (> 85) has decreased steadily over the last six ADDM reports to 36.1% in the 2022 survey. Nearly two thirds of children with ASD in the latest survey had either severe or borderline intellectual disability (ID).

Minority children were more severely affected. Black, Asian, and Hispanic children in the 2022 survey had higher overall ASD prevalence, opens in a new tab (3.66%, 3.82%, and 3.30%, respectively) than White children (2.77%), and were also more likely to have a more severe form of autism. Among Black, Asian, and Hispanic children, 78.9%, 66.5%, and 63.9%, respectively, had either severe or borderline ID, opens in a new tab, compared to 55.6% of Whites.

This report exposes a series of critical public health crises, including a persistent rise in ASD prevalence, an alarming escalation in case severity, and increasingly stark disparities across racial and ethnic groups. This also highlights the urgent need for real-time data.

A deeply troubling finding in the survey is that among children aged 4 years born in 2018, the overall ASD prevalence rate is 2.93% (1 in 34). Prevalence rates typically rise as children age from 4 to 8 and more cases are diagnosed. Compared to the 8-year-olds in the new report, the 4-year-olds showed wider differences by race and ethnicity. Overall prevalence among Black, Asian, and Hispanic children in this group was 3.5%, 3.11%, and 3.82%, respectively, compared to 2.04% among White children.

“The autism epidemic has now reached a scale unprecedented in human history because it affects the young,” said HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. “The risks and costs of this crisis are a thousand times more threatening to our country than COVID-19. Autism is preventable and it is unforgivable that we have not yet identified the underlying causes. We should have had these answers 20 years ago.”

One of the most interesting thing these days is the use of creative language. You can make almost anything be anything with the right semantic words.

If you read this article it has a very different tone on the same subject, read one after the other and you`ll see what i mean:-

https://www.hhs.gov/press-room/autism-e ... rants.html

The above not an article but an official U.S. Government release. The tone is certainly different.

COVID 19 has directly killed over 1,200,000 Americans. The Bubonic plague directly killed between 50 and 200 million people. With a lot less population the 1918 flu pandemic killed 50,000,000 worldwide and 675,000 Americans. Autism apparently has not directly killed anyone. Even if one assumes the prevalence rate is higher then what has been reported and that what we call co morbid conditions are actually Autism I doubt the number of Autism directly caused deaths are nearly that much. It arguably gets more tricky with indirect deaths due to the high autistic mortality rates. But then you have to take into account indirect deaths from these other conditions seemingly making comparisons impossible.

The costs were mentioned but how do you compare? Even if you bake in the costs of everything being much lower and the population being much lower governments provided a lot less help back then.

Bottom line is that it is the official position of the United States government that autism is worse COVID, worse then the 1918 flu, and worse then the Bubonic plague. Think about that.

I noticed that Kennedy said Autism is worse because it affects the young. So did a lot of other pandemics. Being overly generous lets assume he meant COVID. Another confirmation ageism is still an acceptable prejudice.

Almost nine years ago I started the Desperation, Science, Charlatans And Alternative Treatments thread. Those were the good old days.

The fact that it’s from the gov makes it more serious and impossible to ignore.

I always said what is given can be taken away it certainly looks that way on an official level

Out goes the neurodiversity and shiny identity in comes the new plague.

Thing is would the democrats really change this policy much?

It seems all they are interested in is vaccines not autistic people themselves.

The republicans have become anti vax

The democrats want people to keep taking the shots

Every left leaning mainstream article about autism has to have the “vaccines dont cause autism” in there.

It’s all they seem interested in nobody talks about autism itself nobody talks about problems facing us.