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> Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) has increased over tenfold over the past several decades That should be "Diagnosis of ASD has increased tenfold..." because of
by seanhandley 5y ago
> Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) has increased over tenfold over the past several decades
That should be "Diagnosis of ASD has increased tenfold..." because of a heap of factors including the medical criteria of diagnosis changing, a historical underdiagnosis of autism in girls and women, and improved public knowledge of the condition leading to more assessments and diagnoses.
EDIT:
Towards the end, it says
> The frequency of autism in the population has dramatically increased over tenfold the past several decades. This increase appears to be due in part to increased diagnosis efficiency from 1975 to the early 2000s, as well as greater public awareness of the disease [3]. The more recent increase in the last couple of decades suggests environmental factors, and exposures also have a critical role in autism prevalence.
- ghostpepper 5y agoSo are you saying our ability to detect it has not actually improved in the past several decades?
- seanhandley 5y agoI'm saying an increase in diagnoses recently is in large part due to a historical underdiagnosis rather than an increasing frequency of children born with ASD. However, the paper hints at environmental factors being responsible for a proportion of the increase (but does not cite evidence to prove it).
- brutus1213 5y agoPaper seems to refer to environment factors and paternal DNA. Is this established or just a hypothesis (the paternal part especially)? It is kind of sad given the advances in sequencing and state of computing power that we cannot reliably diagnose this stuff with sequencing. I thought the promise of 23andme, and ilk was to gain large amounts of data and make progress on these problems (NIPT seems like a success though).