Autism prevalence growth may be driven by increased medicalization of society causing more diagnoses and increased medical training to hand out the diagnosis. W

Autism prevalence growth may be driven by increased medicalization of society causing more diagnoses and increased medical training to hand out the diagnosis. We have little reliable data on the past with diagnoses only becoming a thing in the 1990s. One should be very careful extrapolating from the existing data since it's not a reading of actual numbers of people affected, but the rates of diagnosis.