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Posted on 05/05/2025 7:46:55 AM PDT by ChessExpert
A few decades ago, autism was rare, but then it rose meteorically. “Reported rates of autism in the United States increased from < 3 per 10,000 children in the 1970s to > 30 per 10,000 children in the 1990s, a 10-fold increase.
Since the 1990s, we have seen another tenfold increase. According to the Centers for Disease Control, autism affects an estimated 1 in 31 children and 1 in 45 adults in the United States today.
(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...
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However, I can say that I see many more obese people than I have in the past.
I remember when the picture of a missing child on a milk carton was a novel event. Since that time amber alerts have become ubiquitous.
We have a ways to go before we make America healthy and great again. It starts with a recognition that we have a problem and that change is required, despite media messages that experts would tell us if there was a problem.
I remember reading once that your chances of having a child with autism increase with the parents age. Particularly the father.
No idea if the article was true, but it would make sense considering how many people wait to have children these days
I came across a post on Farcebook the other day. It was a pic of an older, retired gentleman who went out weekly with his wife to the local diner, where he sat and counted semis, pickups and motorcycles that went by as he and his wife ate breakfast.The comments were filled with "Autism didn't exist back in the day". Well, hate to say so, but it did. It just went undiagnosed in most folks, as they were extremely high functioning. The only time autism was diagnosed in the past, it was only in more severe cases.
The definition of symptoms of autism has expanded ever wider.
I've heard more than one fellow programmer joke that we couldn't do our job well without being a little autistic. LOL
Is Autism eligible for government financial assistance ?
It also means that your child will be given a IEP which will net whatever school they go to four times the amount of federal money they would get for a regular student.
Always follow the money.
More kids, and their parent, on welfare or govt assistence
Over the past 20-25 years they have expanded the definition as to what is autism. It’s now not one disease showing one set of characteristics it’s now a “spectrum”. So naturally there would be an increase in the number of autism cases. What I haven’t seen are any statistics where that is normalized out. Without doing that it’s difficult to honestly say if there’s been an increase and if so by how much.
More self-diagnosis. More recognition of Aspergers.
There is also the possibility of natural selection, as like people congregate in similar jobs that they are all good at, like tech jobs that have a lot of repetition.
Yes. I know someone what was diagnosed as high functioning, and the doctor who did the assessment stated that they could apply for some kind of disability payment. That person opted not to apply.
Canada is working hard to euthanize autistics.
(May 3) A father battles Canada’s suicide machine His autistic daughter has been cleared for MAiD
Parental age and greater awareness is statistically accounted for in the analysis of autism rates; published reviews and met-reviews consistently report parental age + greater awareness accounts for about 20% (on the high end).
Severe autism, whether with mental retardation or not, is most assuredly increasing, and dramatically. This is worldwide, affecting industrialized countries more. South Korea and Japan are the hardest hit.
So I asked three AI programs (Grok, ChatGPT, Gemini) the same set of questions (the typical where, when, why and how type questions). They all came back with this:
Chemical pollutants, especially those that can cause germline mutations, were most common during the late 1960s to the early 1980s. South Korea and Japan were late to the game on cleaning up these pollutants; the United States started getting rid of them starting in the first Reagan administration.
So one generation after heavy pollution would be around 1995, which is when autism rates started to take off. Now that you two generations there are four people (grandparents) who can pass on mutations, so you’ve doubled your chances.
This is just AI’s opinion of the subject and shouldn’t be taken as gospel. Otherwise I would be going to Sweden to pick up my Nobel Prize.
But...we absolutely did not have so many autistic kids when I was growing up. You can’t miss the symptoms once you’ve worked with these kids (I have worked in my church’s special needs ministry). Nowadays autistic kids are everywhere and it looks nothing like intellectual delay due to Down’s Syndrome or perinatal asphyxia or the like. Doctors and psychologists in the past were not likely to all be making the same misdiagnosis.
I think that study goes up to 2005. When they invented the spectrum in the DSM-5 is when they really went balls to the wall on diagnosing. It’s like 1 in 30 kids now and as high as 1 in 12 boys in California as of 2024. A comparison of DSM-4 prevalence of ‘classic’ autism and level-3 (most support required) DSM-5 autism spectrum disorder might provide more information. As it stands down they are comparing rates of DSM-3 and DSM-4 classic autism with DSM-5 autism spectrum disorder levels 1-3.
Is the amount of autism increasing or are the number of diagnoses increasing? Are there more autistic people or are more autistic people being discovered? Has the definition or criteria changed for a diagnoses of autism? Is it easier to be diagnosed as autistic than it has been in the past?
incentives changed for a diagnoses of autism? Follow the money? How cruel.
The definition of autism has been greatly changed and expanded and there are now numerous incentives for an autism diagnoses so that schools, NGOs, health care providers, trial lawyers, and more can feed at the taxpayer trough.
It is a simple economic principle, which are not popular on FR but remain true nonetheless, if you subsidize something you will get more of it.
The fed is fueling the growth in autism diagnoses. It doubt the ratio of autistic to population is increasing.
Thanks
I have studied this extensively because a family member was diagnosed and a number of people in my family have Asperger’s like symptoms including myself. I share the same polymorphism on a gene with said diagnosed family member (who is high functioning but has severe ADHD).
The problem is Asperger’s does not fit into the classical head banging, self-mutilating destructive nature of full blown autism. The EEG is different also, so I was told by a a neurologist (family member is Aspie according to the old criteria).
A few years ago they had several different categories that were not autism such as pervasive developmental disorder and Asperger’s. There were similarities among the different types but they were clearly different disorders.
IMHO the problem is lumping them all under autism spectrum disorder makes it LESS likely to find cures or proper ABA therapies for these individuals.
It’s as if we decided to come up with a “cranial pain disorder” for any headache and treated every headache as if it were a migraine. That makes no sense either.
My observation does not negate the fact that chronic disorders, be they autism, Asperger’s or ADHD for that matter have seen dramatic increases since the 1990s (I don’t have ADHD, my younger family member does).
Is it “autism” — or is it vaccine injury?
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