In 2020, it was estimated that for every 1,000 children aged 8 years, around 28 had autism spectrum disorder. This statistic shows the prevalence of autism spectrum disorder among 8-year-old children in the U.S. from 2000 to 2020, per 1,000 children.

This statistic shows the estimated prevalence of autism spectrum disorder among children aged 3 to 17 years in the U.S. from 2016 to 2019, by gender. In that period, around 4.8 percent of male children and 1.3 percent of female children had been diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder at some point in their life.

The prevalence rate of autism spectrum disorder among children aged eight years in the state Georgia was estimated to be around 25 per 1,000 children. Autism spectrum disorder is a developmental disability characterized by deficits in social communication and interaction as well as repetitive behavior, interest, or activity patterns.

Autism spectrum disorder in children

Among eleven U.S. states with areas that were monitored for autism spectrum disorder in 2020, California had the highest prevalence rates of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) among children aged eight years. In 2020, California’s prevalence rate was estimated to be 44.9 cases per 1,000 children while the rate was about 23 cases per 1,000 children in Maryland. ASD is more common among male than female children, with an estimated 69.4 male cases per 1,000 children and 19.1 female cases per 1,000 children in California in 2020.

Limitations in a child with autism can vary between individuals and develop over time. In California, the median age of diagnosis among children with an ASD diagnosis with an IQ greater than 70 was 35.5 months of age, in comparison to 39 months for children with an ASD diagnosis and an IQ less than or equal to 70, indicating a co-occurring intellectual disability.

Prevalence of ASD has increased significantly since the late 1960s by about 20 to 30 times. Many studies suggest that this is due to improved awareness and recognition as well as diagnostic capabilities. For those living with autism, lifetime costs may total up to 2.68 million U.S. dollars. Autism is likely caused by a combination of genetics and environmental factors, where people with ASD may have abnormal levels of brain serotonin which could disrupt early brain development.

According to a survey carried out in the United States in 2023, 60 percent of those aged between 45 and 64 years of age believed the diagnosis rate for autism was increasing. Furthermore, more than half of over 65 year olds also believed autism diagnoses were increasing.

This statistic is based on a survey by Ipsos MORI and shows the percentage of respondents in select countries worldwide who believed some vaccines cause autism in healthy children as of 2017. It was found that around 44 percent of respondents in India believed vaccines can cause autism, despite this claim being widely discredited.

In 2023, two-thirds of surveyed Americans believed that autistic people are discriminated against at least to a fair amount in the United States. On the other hand, fewer than ten percent felt autistic people experience no discrimination.

This report presents a new estimate of the prevalence of autism among adults aged 18 years and over. This was derived using data from the 2007 Adult Psychiatric Morbidity Survey (APMS 2007) in combination with data from a new study of the prevalence of autism among adults with learning disabilities, who are a key group to study because they could not take part in the APMS 2007 and have been found to have an increased risk of autism.

The study was based on adults with learning disabilities living in private households and communal care establishments in Leicestershire, Lambeth and Sheffield. Whilst the study comprised a relatively small sample with limited geographical coverage and did not include the institutional population, it did include two non-mutually exclusive populations (people in communal care establishments and people with learning disabilities) which were not covered by the APMS 2007.

The study demonstrates that autism is common among people with a learning disability and, in taking these into account, at 1.1 per cent nationally is slightly higher than the previous estimate of 1.0 per cent in the APMS 2007. Sensitivity analysis showed that the estimates for national prevalence produced by this study were relatively insensitive to inaccuracies caused by the limitations.

The aim of this publication is to provide information about the key differences in healthcare between people with a learning disability and those without. It contains aggregated data on key health issues for people who are recorded by their GP as having a learning disability, and comparative data about a control group who are not recorded by their GP as having a learning disability. Eight new indicators were introduced in the 2023-24 reporting year for patients with and without a recorded learning disability. These relate to: • Patients treated with melatonin • Gender breakdown for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) • Anxiety prevalence Six indicators have been removed from the 2023-24 reporting year relating to: • Kidney disease • Epilepsy • Seizure frequency More information on these changes can be found in the Data Quality section of this publication. Data has been collected from participating practices using EMIS and Cegedim Healthcare Systems GP systems.

Latest monthly statistics on Learning Disabilities and Autism (LDA) patients from the Assuring Transformation (AT) collection and Mental Health Services Data Set (MHSDS). Data on inpatients with learning disabilities and/or autism are being collected both within the AT collection and MHSDS. There are differences in the inpatient figures between the AT and MHSDS data sets and work has been ongoing to better understand these. LDA data from MHSDS are experimental statistics, however, while impacts from the cyber incident are still present they will be considered to be management information. From April 2024, LDA MHSDS data has been collected under MHSDS version 6. From 1 July 2022, Integrated Care Boards were established within Integrated Care Systems data and replaced Sustainability and Transformation Plans (STPs). Clinical Commissioning Groups have been replaced by sub-Integrated Care Boards. Data for the AT collection is now submitted by sub-Integrated Care Boards. This has resulted in some renaming within tables and the inclusion of a new Table 5.1b with a patient breakdown by submitting organisation. Patients by originating organisation and commissioning type are still available in Table 5.1a. Data in the tables are now presented by the current organisational structures. Old organisational structures have been mapped to new structures in any time series. Restraints data for MHSDS August 2024 was added to the 'Learning disability services monthly statistics MHSDS datasets' page on 21st November 2024. This will be available within Tables 15-18 of the updated data tables, as well as within the updated csv file.

As of 2023, more than half of adults surveyed in the United States believed the diagnosis rate for autism was increasing. In contrast, only two percent of respondents perceived the diagnosis rate for autism to be decreasing.

Evolution throughout the 12 months for all children included in the EPIGRAM study according to their immigrant status (time*migration effect model with interaction).

In 2023, approximately 42.7 thousand people in South Korea were registered as having an autism spectrum disorder (ASD). This is an increase of around 2,731 percent from the 2000 number of 1,514 registered cases. There has been a steady increase in registered cases.

Substance use disorders aren't usually a symptom of autism. Those with autism are more likely to experience other symptoms, which include

Characteristics of the children included in the EPIGRAM study at baseline (N = 89).

While autism has long been thought of as comprising deficits in social communication, this has been challenged by the proposal of the Double Empathy Problem (Milton, 2012). This theory poses that autistic and nonautistic individuals simply communicate differently than each other, often leading to communication issues only when interacting with someone of the other diagnostic group. This idea has been supported by research showing that communication is effective in matched dyads of autistic individuals and non-autistic individuals, and is only diminished in mixed dyads comprised of both autistic and non-autistic individuals (Crompton et al., 2020). Similarly, it has been shown that self-rated rapport levels are higher in autistic dyads and nonautistic dyads than in mixed dyads, and that differences in verbal and nonverbal behaviours between autistic and nonautistic individuals impact rapport ratings differently (Crompton et al., 2020; Rifai et al., 2022). In this study, we will further examine this area of research by exploring interactive verbal and non-verbal behaviours in dyadic interactions, as well as how these behaviours are related to self-reported ratings of rapport. To investigate this, our study involved participants interacting with a partner for 5 minutes in semi-structured conversations, which were video recorded. Participants were given some potential questions to discuss with the partner but were not limited to these topics of conversation. Partners were either of a matched or different diagnostic group (i.e. dyads of autistic people, dyads of non-autistic people, and dyads where one person was autistic and the other was non-autistic). 48 dyads were included (n = 96). Videos will be coded using ELAN to create the following interactive behavioural variables: number of turns taken, mean utterance length, shortest and longest utterance lengths, percent conversation share, number of verbal and nonverbal backchannels, rate of verbal and nonverbal backchannels per minute of listening, number of questions, number of laughs, number of smiles, mean laugh duration, mean smile duration, percent laughing, and percent smiling. Our research questions include: Are there differences in these interactive verbal and non-verbal behaviours between dyad types? Are there differences in rapport depending on dyad type? Do these interactive verbal and nonverbal behaviours impact rapport ratings differently depending on dyad type? Our hypotheses are that nonautistic dyads will engage in more interactive behaviours than will non-autistic dyads. Additionally, rapport ratings will be lower for individuals in mixed dyads than for those in both autistic and nonautistic dyads. Furthermore, the interactive behaviours will predict rapport ratings for non-autistic dyads but not for autistic dyads.

As of 2023, more than a quarter of people aged 65 and over in the United States thought people with autism faced a great deal of discrimination. In comparison, only 16 percent of respondents aged between 30 and 44 believed that to be the case

Developmental language disorder occurs in 5 to 8% of all mono- or multilingual preschool children (Calder et al., 2022; Norbury et al., 2016; Tomblin et al., 1997; Wu et al., 2023), thus is more common than attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and autism. In addition, 2 to 3% have communication and language disorders associated with intellectual disability, autism or other developmental disabilities (Norbury et al., 2016). Furthermore, these conditions rarely occur in isolation and overlap between them is very common (Gillberg, 2010; Fernell & Gillberg, 2023). For example, all children with autism have communication/ social interaction disorders as a core feature and approximately 50 per cent have co-existing language disorders (Kjellmer et al., 2018). In addition, children with ADHD have language disorders 3 times as often as children without ADHD, affecting functional communication (Redmond, 2016; Korrel et al., 2017).

Previous research on how children diagnosed with developmental language disorder (DLD) fare when they grow up rests entirely on clinical cases. Longitudinal follow-ups of population-representative cohorts are still warranted and are completely lacking in Sweden. Those that exist are based on clinical groups, not population-representative groups followed as systematically as in the current project. One Swedish example of a clinical follow-up of children with severe DLD (~2% of all children), who attended special language preschools, where Speech and Language Pathologists work together with pedagogical staff in daily activities was studied by Ek et al., 2012. A follow-up of 25 children as teenagers was performed. Parents of 23 teenagers participated in a clinical interview that requested information on the child’s current academic achievement, type of school, previous clinical assessments, and developmental diagnoses. Fifteen children participated in a speech and language assessment, and 13 participated in a cognitive assessment. Results: Seven of the 23 teenagers had a mild intellectual disability, and another three had borderline intellectual functioning. Nine had symptoms of disorders on the autism spectrum; five of these had an autism spectrum disorder, and four had clear autistic traits. Six met the criteria for ADHD)/subthreshold ADHD. Thirteen of 15 teenagers had a moderate or severe language disorder, and 13 of 15 had a moderate or severe reading disorder. Overlapping disorders were frequent. None of the individuals who underwent the clinical evaluation were free from developmental problems. Thus, many children with speech and language disorders at preschool age had persistent language problems and/or met the criteria for developmental diagnoses other than speech and language impairment at their follow-up as teenagers.

The main aim of the current project, which is a longitudinal cohort study with registry-based follow-up, is to follow up the child cohort of children who participated in the lead researcher's previous thesis project (Miniscalco, 2007) after population screening at Child Health Services (CHS) (In Swedish BVC) at the age of 2.5 years. In an experimental study, 25 children with a positive language screening result (=developmental language disorder) and 80 children who had a negative language screening result (= typical language development) were recruited (Miniscalco, 2007). These children were matched on age and CHS centre. The CHS nurse referred 3 controls (i.e. negative screen children) to every child with a positive screen result, to create blindness when the speech and language pathologist examined the children within three months after the language screening.

All children then participated in the 4-year visit at CHS including language and general developmental screening. At age 6 years all children were invited to a new language examination and 99 participated, 22 from the DLD group and 77 from the typical developing group. Children in the DLD group were invited to a multidisciplinary assessment and 21 of them participated at age 7-8 years of age.

These young adults are now (2024) almost 30 years old, born in 1995-96. The follow-up will focus on how these individuals who were carefully examined as children (at 2.5 years, 4 years, 6 years and 7-8 years) fared in terms of 1) results from the 4-year visit to the CHS, 2) eligibility for upper secondary school, 3) ICD-10 diagnoses in open and closed specialist care, 4) psychiatric medication, 5) employment and 6) social benefits/financial support. The project is mainly based on routinely collected register data from national authority registers.

The project is also motivated by the fact that a diagnosis of language disorder in Sweden is established by speech and language pathologists and is therefore not reported in the National Board of Health and Welfare's patient register PAR, except in exceptional cases, where there are only diagnoses as doctors in specialized outpatient or inpatient care registers. This means that the prevalence of language disorder cannot be captured via registers and that there is therefore still a great need for more knowledge about what it is like to grow up with DLD.

In 2024, 13 percent of U.S. adults were of the opinion that certain vaccines cause autism in children, an increase from the previous years. The statistic illustrates the percentage of adults in the U.S. who believed vaccines to be a cause of autism in children from 2015 to 2024.