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We have learned to say “1 in 88.” Three years ago, we took a look at the increasing incidence of autism and calculated that it had been growing anywhere from 12% to 15% per year over the last couple of decades. We decided to extrapolate this growth rate forwards, and sadly, we were right. The new incidence of autism is now 1 in 88 in the United States. It is now five times more common n boys (1 in 54 boys have autism) than girls (1 in 252), up form about four times a few years ago. Studies in most industrialized nations come in around the same 1% figure, but there are variances — South Korea has a prevalence of 2.6% (1 in 38!) Additionally, the rate varies significantly among the states in the United States with Utah and New Jersey reporting disproportionally high rates — Utah is at 1 in 47, and New Jersey at 1 in 49 (and 1 in 28 boys). Even more alarming is that these statistics are for the surveillance class, current twelve-year-olds; the rate among younger kids may already be higher.
We learned that the growth rate remains 12% to 15% per year. It is now evident that better diagnosis alone does not explain this. How much better did physicians get at diagnosing kids in the last 4 years? Are doctors better at diagnosis in New Jersey and Utah? This also means autism is not solely a genetic issue, for there cannot be a genetic epidemic. A solely genetic cause and improved diagnosis would not lead to the variance in populations by state and region being so extreme. Want to verify this yourself? Ask your local school speech therapists, because if diagnosis is better, one would think that the kids who were “missed” previously were missed for social quirks, not for something, like, say the inability to speak. We would think most medical professionals would have already picked up on this. But check, we did with the folks here in New York City. And guess what? They cannot hire enough speech therapists to cover all the kids who cannot speak or speak properly. Improved diagnosis and solely genetic cause indeed.
COMING NEXT, MORE “WHAT HAVE WE LEARNED?”
