The number of U.S. children diagnosed with autism continues to rise, according to a new study from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), with an estimated one in every 31 Americans under the age of eight found to have the condition in 2022.
That compares with a rate of one child in 36 in 2020, the report states, its findings taken from surveillance data from 16 areas that participated in the agency’s Autism and Developmental Disabilities Monitoring Network, but which do not presume to be nationally representative.
U.S. Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr, who has previously suggested there could be a link between childhood vaccines and autism, has vowed to uncover the root cause behind the “epidemic” and last week announced a “massive testing and research effort” to establish the truth by September.
However, the CDC’s experts dispute the idea that the condition is becoming more widespread, despite the rise in its data, instead attributing the uptick in cases to improved diagnostics.
The report’s authors say advances in screening and testing “have been apparent” since its last report was published and suggest that “differences in the prevalence of children identified with [autism spectrum disorder] across communities might be due to differences in availability of services for early detection and evaluation and diagnostic practices.”
Consistent with earlier studies, the CDC’s latest analysis again finds the rate higher among boys, noting a 3.4-fold difference among the eight-year-olds it examined.
Another trend observed indicated that autism is more common among Asian, Black, and Hispanic children than it is among white kids, which the researchers said was “consistent with increased access to and provision of identification services among previously underserved groups.”
A racial disparity was also noted in relation to intellectual disability, with more than half of Black children diagnosed with autism at the age of eight also found to struggle with learning difficulties, which was true for less than a third of white children.
There was also a regional disparity in evidence, with as many as one in 19 children in California found to have the condition but just one in 103 in Laredo, Texas.
While much remains unknown about the condition and its causes, Secretary Kennedy insisted at an event in Indiana on Tuesday: “This whole generation of kids is damaged by chronic disease.”
He told his audience that autism cases have “gone up dramatically just in two years”. He said that, when he was a boy in the 1950s and 1960s, the diagnosis rate was as low as one in every 10,000 children, a statement that is consistent with early studies but which overlooks the role played by developments in diagnostic technology in the intervening decades.
In an HHS press release on Tuesday, Kennedy declared that autism is “preventable” and that “the risks and costs of this crisis are a thousand times more threatening to our country than Covid-19.”
Dr Alice Kuo, a professor and chief of medicine-pediatrics at the University of California, Los Angeles, told CNN that the real crisis pertaining to autism in the United States is not the rate of diagnosis.
“The crisis is in the fact that autistic people in our country are dying faster,” she said, alluding to the higher mortality rate that those diagnosed with the condition face compared to the general population.
“That would be the call to action.”
Christopher Banks, president and CEO of the Autism Society of America, also rejected Kennedy’s suggestion that greater prevalence in diagnosis represents an epidemic, saying the spread of “fear, misinformation, or political rhetoric” was not constructive and instead called for fresh research funding.
“It is likely you know or love someone with autism, and we need credible, science-based research to better understand autism, its contributing factors, and the diversity of needs across the spectrum,” he said.
“Further exploring data like this report, requires significant funding, expert-led, quality, transparent research methodology, that follows peer-reviewed due process.”
At a White House cabinet meeting last week, President Donald Trump joined Kennedy in musing on the vaccine theory, saying: “You stop taking something, you stop eating something, or maybe it’s a shot, but something’s causing it.”
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