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Are kids with autism smart


Autism Statistics and Facts | Autism Speaks

Autism Prevalence

  • In 2023, the CDC reported that approximately 1 in 36 children in the U.S. is diagnosed with an autism spectrum disorder (ASD), according to 2020 data.
  • Boys are four times more likely to be diagnosed with autism than girls.
  • Most children were still being diagnosed after age 4, though autism can be reliably diagnosed as early as age 2.
  • 31% of children with ASD have an intellectual disability (intelligence quotient [IQ] <70), 25% are in the borderline range (IQ 71–85), and 44% have IQ scores in the average to above average range (i.e., IQ >85).
  • Autism affects all ethnic and socioeconomic groups.
  • Minority groups tend to be diagnosed later and less often.
  • Early intervention affords the best opportunity to support healthy development and deliver benefits across the lifespan.
  • There is no medical detection for autism.

What causes autism?

  • Research indicates that genetics are involved in the vast majority of cases. 
  • Children born to older parents are at a higher risk for having autism. 
  • Parents who have a child with ASD have a 2 to 18 percent chance of having a second child who is also affected. 
  • Studies have shown that among identical twins, if one child has autism, the other will be affected about 36 to 95 percent of the time. In non-identical twins, if one child has autism, then the other is affected about 31 percent of the time.  
  • Over the last two decades, extensive research has asked whether there is any link between childhood vaccinations and autism. The results of this research are clear: Vaccines do not cause autism. 

Intervention and Supports 

  • Early intervention can improve learning, communication and social skills, as well as underlying brain development.   
  • Applied behavior analysis (ABA) and therapies based on its principles are the most researched and commonly used behavioral interventions for autism. 
  • Many children affected by autism also benefit from other interventions such as speech and occupational therapy. 
  • Developmental regression, or loss of skills, such as language and social interests, affects around 1 in 5 children who will go on to be diagnosed with autism and typically occurs between ages 1 and 3. 

Associated Challenges 

  • An estimated 25-30 percent of people with autism are nonverbal or minimally verbal (fewer than 30 words or unable to use speech alone to communicate)
  • 31% of children with ASD have an intellectual disability (intelligence quotient [IQ] <70) with significant challenges in daily function, 25% are in the borderline range (IQ 71–85). 
  • Nearly half of those with autism wander or bolt from safety.  
  • Nearly two-thirds of children with autism between the ages of 6 and 15 have been bullied.  
  • Nearly 28 percent of 8-year-olds with ASD have self-injurious behaviors. Head banging, arm biting and skin scratching are among the most common. 
  • Drowning remains a leading cause of death for children with autism and accounts for approximately 90 percent of deaths associated with wandering or bolting by those age 14 and younger. 

Associated Medical & Mental Health Conditions 

  • Autism can affect the whole body. 
  • Attention Deficient Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) affects an estimated 30 to 61 percent of children with autism. 
  • More than half of children with autism have one or more chronic sleep problems. 
  • Anxiety disorders affect an estimated 11 to 40 percent of children and teens on the autism spectrum. 
  • Depression affects an estimated 7% of children and 26% of adults with autism. 
  • Children with autism are nearly eight times more likely to suffer from one or more chronic gastrointestinal disorders than are other children.  
  • As many as one-third of people with autism have epilepsy (seizure disorder). 
  • Studies suggest that schizophrenia affects between 4 and 35 percent of adults with autism. By contrast, schizophrenia affects an estimated 1.1 percent of the general population. 
  • Autism-associated health problems extend across the life span – from young children to senior citizens. Nearly a third (32 percent) of 2 to 5 year olds with autism are overweight and 16 percent are obese. By contrast, less than a quarter (23 percent) of 2 to 5 year olds in the general population are overweight and only 10 percent are medically obese. 
  • Risperidone and aripiprazole, the only FDA-approved medications for autism-associated agitation and irritability. 

Caregivers & Families  

  • On average, autism costs an estimated $60,000 a year through childhood, with the bulk of the costs in special services and lost wages related to increased demands on one or both parents. Costs increase with the occurrence of intellectual disability. 
  • Mothers of children with ASD, who tend to serve as the child’s case manager and advocate, are less likely to work outside the home. On average, they work fewer hours per week and earn 56 percent less than mothers of children with no health limitations and 35 percent less than mothers of children with other disabilities or disorders. 

Autism In Adulthood  

  • Over the next decade, an estimated 707,000 to 1,116,000 teens (70,700 to 111,600 each year) will enter adulthood and age out of school based autism services. 
  • Teens with autism receive healthcare transition services half as often as those with other special healthcare needs. Young people whose autism is coupled with associated medical problems are even less likely to receive transition support. 
  • Many young adults with autism do not receive any healthcare for years after they stop seeing a pediatrician. 
  • More than half of young adults with autism remain unemployed and unenrolled in higher education in the two years after high school. This is a lower rate than that of young adults in other disability categories, including learning disabilities, intellectual disability or speech-language impairment. 
  • Of the nearly 18,000 people with autism who used state-funded vocational rehabilitation programs in 2014, only 60 percent left the program with a job. Of these, 80 percent worked part-time at a median weekly rate of $160, putting them well below the poverty level. 
  • Nearly half of 25-year-olds with autism have never held a paying job. 
  • Research demonstrates that job activities that encourage independence reduce autism symptoms and increase daily living skills. 

Economic Costs 

  • The cost of caring for Americans with autism had reached $268 billion in 2015 and would rise to $461 billion by 2025 in the absence of more-effective interventions and support across the life span. 
  • The majority of autism’s costs in the U.S. are for adult services – an estimated $175 to $196 billion a year, compared to $61 to $66 billion a year for children.  
  • On average, medical expenditures for children and adolescents with ASD were 4.1 to 6.2 times greater than for those without autism.   
  • Passage of the 2014 Achieving a Better Life Experience (ABLE) Act allows tax-preferred savings accounts for people with disabilities, including autism, to be established by states.  
  • Passage of autism insurance legislation in all 50 states is providing access to medical treatment and therapies. 

For more information, download Autism and Health: A Special Report by Autism Speaks. 

Many children with autism get significantly smarter over time | Spectrum

Better behavior: Children with autism may show decreases in hyperactivity in their early years.

onfilm / iStock

THIS ARTICLE IS MORE THAN FIVE YEARS OLD

This article is more than five years old. Autism research — and science in general — is constantly evolving, so older articles may contain information or theories that have been reevaluated since their original publication date.

Editor’s Note

This article was originally published 13 May 2017, based on preliminary data presented at the 2017 International Meeting for Autism Research in San Francisco, California. We have updated the article following publication of the study 27 October in Autism Research1. Updates appear below in brackets.

Between the ages of 2 and 8, intelligence increases in half of children with autism. In some of these children, intellectual disability gives way to average intelligence.

The findings suggest that intelligence quotient (IQ) is not stable in young children with autism. It tends to stabilize in typical children by around age 5.

“This tells us that you can’t be too hasty in diagnosing intellectual disability, because you just don’t know what’s going to happen,” says Marjorie Solomon, professor at the University of California, Davis, MIND Institute. Solomon presented the unpublished results today at the 2017 International Meeting for Autism Research in San Francisco, California.

The results run counter to some previous work. In a 2013 study, researchers found that IQ remained steady among people with autism from the time they were diagnosed in childhood until their 40s.

Solomon and her colleagues analyzed data from the Autism Phenome Project, a long-term study of children diagnosed with autism. They looked at IQ scores for 102 children, 20 of them girls, when they were 2 or 3 years old and again when the children were 6 to 8.

They identified four groups of children based on how their IQs changed over that period. The ‘high challenges’ group started with IQs around 44, which dropped slightly to 36; the [‘stable-low’] group started with slightly higher IQs (around 62), which remained stable.

The two other groups showed IQ increases: The ‘lesser challenges’ group started with average IQs that ticked up over time to scores averaging 111, and the ‘changers’ group started with IQs below 70 that increased significantly over time.

About 27 percent of children fell into the ‘high challenges’ group; another 18 percent were in the [‘stable-low’] group; and roughly 22 percent of children were in the ‘lesser challenges’ group.

The largest fraction of children — 33 percent — made up the ‘changers.’ Their average IQ started at 65 and rose to 99.

“We really think it’s important to understand the differences, both biological and in terms of treatment experience and other characteristics, that differentiate” these subgroups, says Solomon.

The groups showed different patterns of change on measures of communication skills and autism severity. They also scored differently on measures of internalizing behaviors, such as anxiety, and externalizing behaviors, such as hyperactivity.

‘Changers’ showed the greatest gains in verbal ability over time, whereas children in the ‘lesser challenges’ showed the greatest improvement in autism severity — some of them to such a degree that they lost their autism diagnoses, Solomon says. All four groups showed fewer internalizing and externalizing behaviors over time.

“We think this is kind of a positive message for families because over half of individuals are seeing big IQ gains over time,” Solomon says, and “all are seeing internalizing and externalizing behaviors drop off. ”

[Low-income and rural children were not adequately represented in the Northern California-based sample, however, so it is unclear whether these gains reflect a national trend.]

The researchers plan to follow the children into middle school and study the relationship between their IQ scores and brain imaging data.

For more reports from the 2017 International Meeting for Autism Research, please click here.

References:

  1. Solomon M. et al. Autism Res. 11, 121-132 (2017) PubMed

Scientists: in men with high intelligence, children with autism are born one third more often

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A father's high intelligence increases the risk of having a child with autism by a third. In addition, this risk also depends on the activity of genes associated with microglia, which are more active in men.

Men with high intelligence are 31% more likely to have children with autism, scientists have found. The results of the work were represented by at the International Autism Research Meeting in San Francisco.

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The new findings are consistent with observations made in the 1940s, when psychiatrists Leo Kanner and Hans Asperger noted that fathers of children with autism tend to be very intelligent and some of them work in technical industries. A 2012 study in the Netherlands found that there are more children with autism in regions where high-tech manufacturing dominates.

In a new paper, Karolinska Institute Associate Professor Renee Gardner set out to test the validity of Kanner's and Asperger's assumptions. With colleagues, she collected the medical records of 309,803 children whose fathers were drafted into the Swedish army, scoring high on the technical part of the Swedish IQ test.

It turned out that men with an IQ of 111 and above had children with autism one third more likely than those with an IQ of about 100. The study took into account such factors as the level of education, the socio-economic status of the family, the age of the parents and so on.

The association of father's IQ with the risk of mental retardation or the development of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) in children was reversed. So, for men with an IQ of 75 and below, the risk of developing ADHD in their children was 65% higher than the average.

"Seeing this association of autism with high paternal intelligence is very interesting," says Gardner. However, she notes that the risk is generally quite small and the findings still cannot explain what causes autism.

In addition, data on mothers were not taken into account in the work. This information turned out to be inaccessible: if the researchers obtained information about the fathers from the army archives, then there was nowhere to get information about the mothers.

A another study presented at the same conference found that more autism in boys was due to higher activity of genes associated with microglia, cells that play an important role in brain formation and maintaining contacts between synapses.

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The relationship between autism and microglial cell count has already been known. In addition, autism is 2-5 times more likely to be diagnosed in boys. And although psychiatrists see the reason for this difference in the underdiagnosis of girls, they admit that numerical differences between the sexes do exist.

Neurogeneticist Donna Werling, in search of the biological cause of autism, investigated how gene expression differs in brain tissue between men and women. Her team suggested that the expression of genes associated with autism should be higher in men. The results of the study showed that genes associated with microglia are more active in men.

Grouping the results by age group showed that the greatest difference in the expression of microglial genes is observed a few months before the birth of a child.

Werling suggests that it is possible that higher microglial activity makes boys more sensitive to genes associated with autism. At the same time, girls' less active microglia protect them from the effects of these genes.

These findings are consistent with other studies that have shown that brain changes leading to autism occur before birth. In addition, there are other works confirming the connection between autism and microglia. For example, in 2010, scientists found that out of 13 brain samples from people with autism, nine had unusually dense, large, or active microglial cells. And in 2014, another team found that mice that had small amounts of microglia early in life exhibited behaviors reminiscent of autism, such as not wanting to interact with other mice.

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Four autism myths long overdue to be busted

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  • for BBC Future

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The four misconceptions about autism described below need to be dispelled, the author believes BBC Future who wrote Neurotribes: A legacy of autism and a smarter approach to people with different minds .

The history of autism is partly the history of myths: postulated under the guise of scientific facts by medical experts, shaping public attitudes towards this extremely complex disease, and ultimately debunked by subsequent research.

We have been going through this vicious circle of myth-making for decades - often with devastating consequences for the lives of autistic people and their families.

(More BBC Future articles in Russian)

One of the first such myths was spread by child psychiatrist Leo Kanner, the man who credits himself with the first description of childhood autism.

When I was writing a book "NeuroTribes" then discovered that Kanner was a rather ambiguous personality.

To begin with, his claim that he, in fact, discovered autism, is groundless - his predecessors deserve this glory.

In addition, Kanner was wrong on several other important points. In an article published in Time magazine at 1948, he accused the parents of his patients that the lack of proper love and care on their part led to the development of autism in their children.

This image of the "refrigerator mother" became firmly established in the public consciousness - as a result, two generations of autistic children were placed in clinics where they were subjected to cruel punishments, imprisonment and ruthless experimental "treatment".

Today we know that Kanner's claims about "cold" mothers have no evidence.

However, other equally pernicious autism-related myths persist in society - they misallocate meager research funds, play a role in formulating misguided social policies, deplete the resources of families of patients, and distort the image of society about autists.

Here are four of the most harmful myths about autism that absolutely need to be dispelled.

Myth 1: Autism used to be less common than it is now

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Internet forums for new mothers are full of variations on the well-known horror story, according to which in 1970 the incidence of autism among American schoolchildren was one in 10 thousand people, and now it is one case in 68 people .

Some parents and activists mistakenly blame vaccinations for this, citing a 1998 study by gastroenterologist Andrew Wakefield, who suggested a link between the measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine and a bowel disorder dubbed autistic enterocolitis.

There is no scientific data in favor of the Wakefield hypothesis - the co-authors of the article in which it was put forward subsequently abandoned this point of view, and the Lancet magazine, which printed the material, later apologized to readers.

In fact, the main reason for the dramatic increase in autism in recent decades is that more children, adolescents and adults are being diagnosed.

Image copyright, Getty

Image caption,

There is no scientific evidence to suggest that autism has increased in recent years. The disease was described very narrowly, so it was mistakenly thought of as a fairly rare occurrence - not least because of Kanner.

Kanner sought to avoid blurring the signs of the syndrome, of which he considered himself the discoverer, and therefore opposed making such a diagnosis to children if the symptoms were even slightly different from those described by him in 1943.

Once he even admitted that he made only one out of 10 children referred to him for a consultation is diagnosed with autism.

In the United States, this practice meant that until the late 1980s, parents often had to see their child for nine or ten specialists before they were diagnosed with autism.

Not all members of the working class and racial minorities could afford such expenses. And girls with autism were ignored by psychiatrists until the end of the last century.

It is noteworthy that in the end, the mother of a seriously autistic girl, the British psychiatrist Lorna Wing, now deceased, was able to overcome Kanner's influence on the interpretation of the diagnosis.

In the late 1980s, she introduced to the psychiatric community the concept of a continuum of autistic disorders (later the word "continuum" was replaced by "spectrum"), and shortly thereafter, the concept of Asperger's syndrome.

Image copyright, Getty

Image caption,

Some researchers are too preoccupied with looking for external causes of autism, such as vaccinations

Both new terms gained huge popularity in clinical psychiatry, as they reflected the variety of conditions observed in patients much better than the restricted Kanner model.

Wing and colleagues also made it clear that autism is a lifelong developmental disorder and not the rare early childhood psychosis that Kanner thought it was.

When I interviewed Wing for my book in 2011 at the autism center that bears her name in the London suburb of Bromley, she said that with the acceptance of the concept of the autism spectrum disorder by the scientific community, the increase in diagnosed cases of autism was to be expected.

In addition, she categorically denied the connection of autism with vaccination: "It is purely a matter of diagnosis."

However, in recent years, a significant amount of research, supported by grants from US organizations such as the National Institutes of Health, is devoted to the search for potential external factors in the development of autism (as if this disease were a by-product of life in the modern world).

While the needs of patients and their families for better medical care, affordable housing and employment are not given due attention.

In this sense, America has a lot to learn from the British National Autism Society, which spends the lion's share of its budget on improving the quality of life of autistic people and their loved ones.

Myth 2: People with autism lack empathy

Previously, in the medical literature and in the media, autistic people were often portrayed as emotionless robots incapable of empathy - like sociopaths.

One of the first newspaper articles on Asperger's syndrome, published in 1990, described the disease as "a disease of people incapable of feelings", and called the patients themselves "cruel" and "heartless".

In fact, people with autism are often very worried about the feelings of others - sometimes so much that it paralyzes their will.

But they have difficulty recognizing the non-verbal cues from others—the subtle changes in facial expressions, body language, and tone of voice—that "neurotypical" (i. e., "normal") people use to inform each other of their current emotional state.

The assumption that autistic people are allegedly devoid of empathy continues to be the cause of unjustifiably cruel attitude towards patients on the part of society, including in the form of unfounded statements by public figures.

Image copyright, Getty

Image caption,

Recently, more and more doctors have criticized attempts to make autistic children behave "normally"

many serial killers.

It would be fair to say that both autistic and non-autistic people have difficulty seeing the world through each other's eyes.

The use of "social stories" - visualization of situations of interpersonal communication - can accelerate the learning process of children with autistic disorders; neurotypical people, in turn, can better understand autistic people by spending more time with them outside of clinics, in conditions of minimal sensory input.

Empathy is a two-way street.

Myth 3: Make autistic children behave "normally"

can be made "indistinguishable" from healthy peers as a result of many years of intensive work to change their behavior in the course of individual lessons.

The program developed by Lovaas, known as Applied Behavior Analysis, is still the most widely used method of early intervention in autism in the world.

However, there are a number of problems associated with this method - to begin with, most families simply cannot afford (neither financially nor logistically) Lovaas' proposed "total immersion" program, which requires the participation of "all important people for the patient in all significant life situations."

(Practicers of this method now recommend 40 hours of this therapy per week, but even this amount is too much for most parents without significant outside help).

In addition, Lovaas exaggerated the success of his technique. His former colleague Kristin Lord, a leading researcher in the field of autism, later said that his claims about the successful return of patients to "normal functioning", circulated by the press, "do not correspond to what happened in reality, and cannot be used as a scientific proof".

Moreover, some adults with autism, recalling being forced to copy the behavior of normal peers as children, say that this traumatic experience turned into a lifelong sense of anxiety for them.

Image copyright, Getty

Image caption,

Autism must be seen as a serious disorder that affects all aspects of the patient's life

Julia Bascom writes in her memoirs: "As a child, I suffered from autism. And for an autistic person, the worst thing is not being mistreated by others , but therapy.

Barry Prizant, co-author of an alternative learning model for autistic children, has recently published a book in which he urges parents and clinicians to consider "autistic" behavior in an autistic child (such as arm waving and echolalia - repeating other people's words) not as a sign of pathology, but as a strategy for adapting to an environment that looks chaotic, unpredictable and frightening.

The problem with trying to get a child to copy the behavior of ordinary peers is that "the patient is treated as a problem to be solved, not as a person to be understood," notes Prizant.

Such therapy often even worsens the patient's condition: "It is much more useful to try to understand what exactly is the cause of such behavior."

In trying to understand why a child is behaving in a certain way, parents and clinicians can learn to identify the causes of changes in their emotional state (which may well be such banal irritants as a rubbing collar or the sound of a malfunctioning fluorescent lamp) and, if possible, mitigate their impact.

This can lead to long-term changes in the behavior of the patient, as well as help to identify the child's abilities and difficulties that he has to deal with.

Myth 4: We fashionably diagnose eccentric children too often

The problem with Lorna Wing's concept of the spectrum is, by her own admission, that it "blurs the line between disorder and normal eccentricity. "

In other words, each of the symptoms exhibited by autistic people is, to one degree or another, inherent in non-autistic people.

Autistic people are characterized by self-stimulation, or stimming (repetitive movements), while neurotypical people are characterized by fussy movements.

Autistic people have fixations and obsessions, neurotypical people have hobbies and hobbies.

Autistic people have "sensory sensitivity" (including increased irritability when in contact with a number of materials) - a neurotypical person may simply not like polyester clothing.

In other words, there is a huge gray area between autism and its absence. (One of Wing's favorite sayings was that of British politician Winston Churchill: "Nature never draws sharp lines without blurring them first.")

Researchers have even coined a term for this border zone: the broad autism phenotype.

However, for the most part, people who fall under this definition are simply considered eccentrics in everyday life - like that person in a pub, bothering his interlocutors with a detailed story about the course of some historical battle, or a goth girl who adores her cat and recites pieces of dialogue by heart from your favorite sci-fi TV series.

Lately, hipsters' favorite pastime has been labeling autistic "geeks" who have achieved fame. Did Apple co-founder Steve Jobs suffer from a similar disorder? And what about the superhuman performance of Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer?

American comedian Jerome Seinfeld, for example, diagnosed himself with autism after watching the Broadway production of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, based on the British novel of the same name, where the story is told from the perspective of an autistic boy ( True, Seinfeld soon hurriedly retracted his words).

And herein lies the problem: if billionaires like Mayer or Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg really have autism, and one of America's most famous comedians finds symptoms of this disease himself, why is it that a huge number of autistic adults still have difficulty make ends meet?

Image copyright, Getty

Image caption,

There's a huge gray area between autism and the absence of it

Why do parents of children with autism say they constantly lack the resources to help their child find a job and adjust to an independent life? Is autism a functional disorder and not just "different from others"?

The fact of the matter is that autism is precisely a disorder.

Learn more