Case/control is not the only kind of analysis you can do here. You could define a numerical scale describing someone's degree of "autistic-ness" and train a cla

Case/control is not the only kind of analysis you can do here. You could define a numerical scale describing someone's degree of "autistic-ness" and train a classifier on that instead of a binary categorization, for example. Obviously there are challenges in doing so, just as there are with the binary case. But if a continuous scale turns out to be a better match for the underlying phenomenon, then obviously it's worth modeling in that way.