7 ms·

What's the deal with autism rates?

72 points by paulpauper 2y ago

theyknowitsxmas 2y ago
[flagged]
nsbk 2y ago
I'm short on time and couldn't read the whole article, but apparently metabolic health is a huge factor that doesn't seem to be pointed at here. Obese parents, both mum and dad, multiply the likelihood of child autism by something like 4x. It could be that the obesity epidemic is the cause of the rising autism rates. Same goes for other metabolic health impacting factors such as diabetes, hypertension, and the likes.
- atomicnumber3 2y ago
  Very unfortunate for us, then, that there's dozens of independent multibillion dollar industries who are not going to like that that's the root cause :/
  - renewiltord 2y ago
    Fortunately, there are independent multibillion dollar industries who would prefer to solve it with semaglutide, tirzepatide, and retratutide. Of course, the article makes the case that there's no epidemic so none of this is really important. We don't have to go "oh woe is me oh woe is me" constantly.
- SoftTalker 2y ago
  [flagged]
- galangalalgol 2y ago
  The paper says there is no epidemic and never was. The only increase is in diagnosis. That is due to a number of causes like changing the criteria for diagnosis, adding incentives to be diagnosed, and several other things. The two strongest arguments presented were that autism isn't rarer in adults, and some studies that involved testing with tests that haven't changed over the period didn't see a change in actual scores even though diagnosis increased. My personal thoughts are that autoimmune conditions that have similar effects to some aspects of autism are demonstrared to increasing, and when that happens in young people it gets diagnosed as asd because that has a name and gets extra services vs having some poorly understood autoimmune thing.
- brigandish 2y ago
  How does obesity correlate with IQ? As the article points out: > So much spending on care for autistic people is wasteful. Someone with a mild case of Asperger’s does not need to hit a mandated spending cap for their condition, and someone with mental retardation who convinced a clinician to give them a more favorable diagnosis should not be receiving treatment intended for autistics and found to be useless for the merely mentally retarded. More importantly, even if the article didn’t specifically address your concerns about metabolic health, it certainly gave a plethora of reasons for why the “rising autism rates” are not rising in truth. > So remember this: > There is not, and has never been, any credible evidence for a “real” epidemic of autism or for any of its proposed environmental causes. Answering the question of if there is a “real” autism epidemic has provided a complete answer to the question of why there might be.
- sudosteph 2y ago
  I'm talking about it in another thread too, but large birth weight is apparently a pretty significanly correlated risk factor for developing ASD. Studies show that obese mothers are more likely to give birth to higher weight children.
- dragonwriter 2y ago
  > Obese parents, both mum and dad, multiply the likelihood of child autism by something like 4x. It could be that the obesity epidemic is the cause of the rising autism rates. Even assuming the first sentence is correct going from 0% prevalence to 100% prevalence of something with a 4x risk increase would explain only a very small part of the increase in the various proxies by which the prevalence is estimated, whereas (as the article argues) change in diagnostic criteria and reporting practices can easily explain all of it. So, sure, to the extent there is any real increase in prevalence (which is not at all clear), factors like parental obesity, parental age, and other things that have some indication of being either risk factors or proxies for unidentified risk factors may either play a role or be indicative of things that do, but we can be fairly certain what the main driving factor in the numbers is, and it is sufficient to explain the observations, and invoking anything else is a violation of the principal of parsimony.
beefnugs 2y ago
"we will know by august" probably have to rub wild game guts on our foreheads or something APPLY DIRECTLY TO FOREHEAD
- bitwize 2y ago
  [flagged]
brigandish 2y ago
Long, thorough, and worth reading to the end.
sudosteph 2y ago
> People who would never have survived childbirth or early childhood in previous generations are surviving nowadays at historically unprecedented rates. I have seen studies that correlate c-section deliveries with a somehat significant increased chance of autism, so that would track. I was born by csection myself, and both myself and my mom would have died if that wasn't an option. I've never been evaluated for and am not diagnosed with autism, but given the broadened DSM criteria, it's possible they would have tested me and labeled me with something like that if I had been a kid today. Instead they just settled on "speech disability" and put me in weekly speech therapy for all of elementary school. I'm not sure if having a permanent disability label on me from a young age would have been a good thing to be honest.
- rightbyte 2y ago
  > I have seen studies that correlate c-section deliveries with a somehat significant increased chance of autism, so that would track. I think older age of mothers are correlated with both?
  - sudosteph 2y ago
    As I mentioned in another reply, heavy birth weight is another stat somewhat significantly correlated with ASD diagnosis that could correlate with c-sections. Interestingly high birth weight seems to be more common in mothers in their 20s.
    - nradov 2y ago
      High birth weight is also correlated with gestational diabetes. There could be some metabolic or hormonal intersection with autism here.
- nis0s 2y ago
  There seems to be a relationship here, as shown in this paper, https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5837358/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5837358/ I am skeptical of the idea that a CS itself produces any conditions for ASD. But it would make sense that those who would have otherwise died during child birth and survive are now likely to change present health demographics. Honestly, a lot of autistic people are doing well in life, and in fact many are doing better than their neurotypical peers. Autistic traits need to be understood better because they provide better understanding of human cognition and its functionality.
roxolotl 2y ago
Very long article which largely amounts to the “prevalence of left-handedness chart”[0]. If you don’t believe that, or you’d like to understand how that phenomenon works it’s a great read. [0]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/09/22/the-surprising-geography-of-american-left-handedness/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/09/22/the-s...
anatoly 2y ago
There's lots of true things in that post, and it's undeniable that there's been huge broadening of criteria and it's responsible for a lot of the growth in stats. The question is, is it responsible for all of it? To understand that we have to hold severity constant and compare across time. A recent study tries to define "profound autism" as "nonverbal, minimally verbal, or IQ<50". They found a significant increase in US children aged 8 from 2000-2016 with profound autism. Non-profound autism increased much more, which makes sense given the broadening of criteria. The study is https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10576490/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10576490/ Anecdotally, any speech therapist with a long career will likely remark on a local increase of severe autism cases over the last 20-30 yrs. It's not as "skyrocketing" as ASD stats, but prevalence has likely increased substantially.
- kgwxd 2y ago
  >any speech therapist with a long career will likely remark on a local increase of severe autism cases over the last 20-30 yrs. Population growth.
  - binary132 2y ago
    are you saying the population of speech therapists is not growing proportionately to the general populace?
    - em-bee 2y ago
      i have no opinion on whether population growth is a factor, but to make an observation of the growth of cases it wouldn't matter because the therapists probably know each other, so having more therapists in a locality would be included in the observation. there are more cases not because more people come to me, but because i know more therapists having cases.
      - binary132 2y ago
        that still sounds explainable by population growth, maybe
WarOnPrivacy 2y ago
My oldest and youngest are autistic and are 10y apart. Only the younger is diagnosed. The difference is how difficult it was to obtain an autism diagnosis (here,then). For the former, it was difficult to impossible to find someone who was ¹qualified and ²willing to consider autism. For the latter, qualified specialists were readily available and the diagnosis was seamless.
bequanna 2y ago
Has the use of SSRIs or ADHD drugs while pregnant/breastfeeding been studied?
- WarOnPrivacy 2y ago
  That sort of info that is routinely collected, when studies involve prenatal/postnatal data. I had older relatives who were obviously or probably autistic but were undiagnosed - because who had even heard of autism then. AHD meds and SSRI weren't yet a thing - but these folks mostly predated even Tricyclic ADs.
- didibus 2y ago
  The linked article conclusion is that there is no real increase in the real rate of autism, only in the measurements.
junto 2y ago
There have been various studies on the potential connection between autism and the prevalence of a parent (most often the father) of working in STEM. Heightened incidences in areas of Silicon Valley for example where both parents work in STEM as well have been observed as hotspots. This had also been observed by clinical psychologists working with autistic children as a curious anomaly (a friend has a PhD in this topic and has worked for 30 years with families who have an autistic child) that when first meeting the parents it was often observed that one of the parents (often the father) displayed ASD tendencies and was often undiagnosed. One could therefore argue that the “resurgence of the nerd” has been partially a trigger for an increase in autism cases, but more than likely the higher incidence of diagnosis is the stronger factor. Of course men are more likely to work in STEM. As with all complex psychological divergences, it is highly likely that autism has a number of factors that can trigger it, and as we see in all highly specialized science topics, that in which you specialize is where you seek the answer. When all you have is a hammer… Dickerson, A. S., Rahbar, M. H., Han, I., Bakian, A. V., Bilder, D. A., Harrington, R. A., … & Kirby, R. S. (2014). Autism spectrum disorder prevalence and association with parental occupation in the Texas Autism Surveillance Project. ScienceDaily. Baron-Cohen, S., Wheelwright, S., Stott, C., Bolton, P., & Goodyer, I. (1997). Is there a link between engineering and autism? Autism, 1(2), 153-163. Baron-Cohen, S., Scott, F. J., Allison, C., Williams, J., Bolton, P., Matthews, F. E., & Brayne, C. (2012). Diagnosed autism is more common in an IT-rich region. Cambridge University Research News. Baron-Cohen, S., Wheelwright, S., Skinner, R., Martin, J., & Clubley, E. (2001). The Autism-Spectrum Quotient (AQ): Evidence from Asperger Syndrome/high-functioning autism, males and females, scientists and mathematicians. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 31(1), 5-17. Dickerson, A. S., Rahbar, M. H., & Pearson, D. A. (2014). Parental occupation and risk of autism spectrum disorder in offspring: A population-based study. Research in Autism Spectrum Disorders, 8(8), 974-985. Feldman, M., & Belsky, J. (2023). Parental STEM skills and risk of autism spectrum disorders in children. Journal of Political Economy, 131(4). Lazic, S. E., & McLean, R. J. (2023). STEM-skilled parents and autism spectrum disorder in offspring: A case-control study. ResearchGate preprint.
BlueTemplar 2y ago
This article was a lot of work, which, while commendable, looks like it could be easily avoided by the following rule of thumb : If your numbers/data/chart/speech does not feature uncertainty, then (in a professional setting) you should be dismissed as a bullshitter or incompetent. (The importance of thinking about how and how much you might be wrong is drilled out into the minds of students from the start of university for a good reason.)
incomingpain 2y ago
That first graph cuts off at 2018 after showing decrease? But that doesnt jive. The CDC numbers never show any decline. 1 in 44 in 2018, an increase. 1 in 36 in 2020. 1 in 31 in 2022. The common meme is that grandma with her spoon collection or grandpa and his HO scale trains was autism. It's not that autism came out of the blue. Commonly the claim is that awareness and testing is improving. Right but that cant explain that away. The CAUSE of autism must still be present and increasing. It's not vaccines, there's loads of unvaccinated autistic kids. 1 in 50 in somalia have autism but somalia is well known for not being well vaccinated. Its not pesticides, this is anticorrelative when accounting. RFK jr says the cause will be known by the end of the year. I did the research, im fairly confident I know the cause. I wonder if I figured it out.

72 points by paulpauper 2y ago

[flagged]

nsbk 2y ago

I'm short on time and couldn't read the whole article, but apparently metabolic health is a huge factor that doesn't seem to be pointed at here. Obese parents, both mum and dad, multiply the likelihood of child autism by something like 4x. It could be that the obesity epidemic is the cause of the rising autism rates. Same goes for other metabolic health impacting factors such as diabetes, hypertension, and the likes.

atomicnumber3 2y ago
Very unfortunate for us, then, that there's dozens of independent multibillion dollar industries who are not going to like that that's the root cause :/
- renewiltord 2y ago
  Fortunately, there are independent multibillion dollar industries who would prefer to solve it with semaglutide, tirzepatide, and retratutide. Of course, the article makes the case that there's no epidemic so none of this is really important. We don't have to go "oh woe is me oh woe is me" constantly.
SoftTalker 2y ago
[flagged]
galangalalgol 2y ago
The paper says there is no epidemic and never was. The only increase is in diagnosis. That is due to a number of causes like changing the criteria for diagnosis, adding incentives to be diagnosed, and several other things. The two strongest arguments presented were that autism isn't rarer in adults, and some studies that involved testing with tests that haven't changed over the period didn't see a change in actual scores even though diagnosis increased. My personal thoughts are that autoimmune conditions that have similar effects to some aspects of autism are demonstrared to increasing, and when that happens in young people it gets diagnosed as asd because that has a name and gets extra services vs having some poorly understood autoimmune thing.
brigandish 2y ago
How does obesity correlate with IQ? As the article points out: > So much spending on care for autistic people is wasteful. Someone with a mild case of Asperger’s does not need to hit a mandated spending cap for their condition, and someone with mental retardation who convinced a clinician to give them a more favorable diagnosis should not be receiving treatment intended for autistics and found to be useless for the merely mentally retarded. More importantly, even if the article didn’t specifically address your concerns about metabolic health, it certainly gave a plethora of reasons for why the “rising autism rates” are not rising in truth. > So remember this: > There is not, and has never been, any credible evidence for a “real” epidemic of autism or for any of its proposed environmental causes. Answering the question of if there is a “real” autism epidemic has provided a complete answer to the question of why there might be.
sudosteph 2y ago
I'm talking about it in another thread too, but large birth weight is apparently a pretty significanly correlated risk factor for developing ASD. Studies show that obese mothers are more likely to give birth to higher weight children.
dragonwriter 2y ago
> Obese parents, both mum and dad, multiply the likelihood of child autism by something like 4x. It could be that the obesity epidemic is the cause of the rising autism rates. Even assuming the first sentence is correct going from 0% prevalence to 100% prevalence of something with a 4x risk increase would explain only a very small part of the increase in the various proxies by which the prevalence is estimated, whereas (as the article argues) change in diagnostic criteria and reporting practices can easily explain all of it. So, sure, to the extent there is any real increase in prevalence (which is not at all clear), factors like parental obesity, parental age, and other things that have some indication of being either risk factors or proxies for unidentified risk factors may either play a role or be indicative of things that do, but we can be fairly certain what the main driving factor in the numbers is, and it is sufficient to explain the observations, and invoking anything else is a violation of the principal of parsimony.

beefnugs 2y ago

"we will know by august" probably have to rub wild game guts on our foreheads or something APPLY DIRECTLY TO FOREHEAD

bitwize 2y ago
[flagged]

brigandish 2y ago

Long, thorough, and worth reading to the end.

sudosteph 2y ago

> People who would never have survived childbirth or early childhood in previous generations are surviving nowadays at historically unprecedented rates. I have seen studies that correlate c-section deliveries with a somehat significant increased chance of autism, so that would track. I was born by csection myself, and both myself and my mom would have died if that wasn't an option. I've never been evaluated for and am not diagnosed with autism, but given the broadened DSM criteria, it's possible they would have tested me and labeled me with something like that if I had been a kid today. Instead they just settled on "speech disability" and put me in weekly speech therapy for all of elementary school. I'm not sure if having a permanent disability label on me from a young age would have been a good thing to be honest.

rightbyte 2y ago
> I have seen studies that correlate c-section deliveries with a somehat significant increased chance of autism, so that would track. I think older age of mothers are correlated with both?
- sudosteph 2y ago
  As I mentioned in another reply, heavy birth weight is another stat somewhat significantly correlated with ASD diagnosis that could correlate with c-sections. Interestingly high birth weight seems to be more common in mothers in their 20s.
  - nradov 2y ago
    High birth weight is also correlated with gestational diabetes. There could be some metabolic or hormonal intersection with autism here.
nis0s 2y ago
There seems to be a relationship here, as shown in this paper, https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5837358/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5837358/ I am skeptical of the idea that a CS itself produces any conditions for ASD. But it would make sense that those who would have otherwise died during child birth and survive are now likely to change present health demographics. Honestly, a lot of autistic people are doing well in life, and in fact many are doing better than their neurotypical peers. Autistic traits need to be understood better because they provide better understanding of human cognition and its functionality.

roxolotl 2y ago

Very long article which largely amounts to the “prevalence of left-handedness chart”[0]. If you don’t believe that, or you’d like to understand how that phenomenon works it’s a great read. [0]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/09/22/the-surprising-geography-of-american-left-handedness/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/09/22/the-s...

anatoly 2y ago

There's lots of true things in that post, and it's undeniable that there's been huge broadening of criteria and it's responsible for a lot of the growth in stats. The question is, is it responsible for all of it? To understand that we have to hold severity constant and compare across time. A recent study tries to define "profound autism" as "nonverbal, minimally verbal, or IQ<50". They found a significant increase in US children aged 8 from 2000-2016 with profound autism. Non-profound autism increased much more, which makes sense given the broadening of criteria. The study is https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10576490/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10576490/ Anecdotally, any speech therapist with a long career will likely remark on a local increase of severe autism cases over the last 20-30 yrs. It's not as "skyrocketing" as ASD stats, but prevalence has likely increased substantially.

kgwxd 2y ago
>any speech therapist with a long career will likely remark on a local increase of severe autism cases over the last 20-30 yrs. Population growth.
- binary132 2y ago
  are you saying the population of speech therapists is not growing proportionately to the general populace?
  - em-bee 2y ago
    i have no opinion on whether population growth is a factor, but to make an observation of the growth of cases it wouldn't matter because the therapists probably know each other, so having more therapists in a locality would be included in the observation. there are more cases not because more people come to me, but because i know more therapists having cases.
    - binary132 2y ago
      that still sounds explainable by population growth, maybe

WarOnPrivacy 2y ago

My oldest and youngest are autistic and are 10y apart. Only the younger is diagnosed. The difference is how difficult it was to obtain an autism diagnosis (here,then). For the former, it was difficult to impossible to find someone who was ¹qualified and ²willing to consider autism. For the latter, qualified specialists were readily available and the diagnosis was seamless.

bequanna 2y ago

Has the use of SSRIs or ADHD drugs while pregnant/breastfeeding been studied?

WarOnPrivacy 2y ago
That sort of info that is routinely collected, when studies involve prenatal/postnatal data. I had older relatives who were obviously or probably autistic but were undiagnosed - because who had even heard of autism then. AHD meds and SSRI weren't yet a thing - but these folks mostly predated even Tricyclic ADs.
didibus 2y ago
The linked article conclusion is that there is no real increase in the real rate of autism, only in the measurements.

junto 2y ago

There have been various studies on the potential connection between autism and the prevalence of a parent (most often the father) of working in STEM. Heightened incidences in areas of Silicon Valley for example where both parents work in STEM as well have been observed as hotspots. This had also been observed by clinical psychologists working with autistic children as a curious anomaly (a friend has a PhD in this topic and has worked for 30 years with families who have an autistic child) that when first meeting the parents it was often observed that one of the parents (often the father) displayed ASD tendencies and was often undiagnosed. One could therefore argue that the “resurgence of the nerd” has been partially a trigger for an increase in autism cases, but more than likely the higher incidence of diagnosis is the stronger factor. Of course men are more likely to work in STEM. As with all complex psychological divergences, it is highly likely that autism has a number of factors that can trigger it, and as we see in all highly specialized science topics, that in which you specialize is where you seek the answer. When all you have is a hammer… Dickerson, A. S., Rahbar, M. H., Han, I., Bakian, A. V., Bilder, D. A., Harrington, R. A., … & Kirby, R. S. (2014). Autism spectrum disorder prevalence and association with parental occupation in the Texas Autism Surveillance Project. ScienceDaily. Baron-Cohen, S., Wheelwright, S., Stott, C., Bolton, P., & Goodyer, I. (1997). Is there a link between engineering and autism? Autism, 1(2), 153-163. Baron-Cohen, S., Scott, F. J., Allison, C., Williams, J., Bolton, P., Matthews, F. E., & Brayne, C. (2012). Diagnosed autism is more common in an IT-rich region. Cambridge University Research News. Baron-Cohen, S., Wheelwright, S., Skinner, R., Martin, J., & Clubley, E. (2001). The Autism-Spectrum Quotient (AQ): Evidence from Asperger Syndrome/high-functioning autism, males and females, scientists and mathematicians. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 31(1), 5-17. Dickerson, A. S., Rahbar, M. H., & Pearson, D. A. (2014). Parental occupation and risk of autism spectrum disorder in offspring: A population-based study. Research in Autism Spectrum Disorders, 8(8), 974-985. Feldman, M., & Belsky, J. (2023). Parental STEM skills and risk of autism spectrum disorders in children. Journal of Political Economy, 131(4). Lazic, S. E., & McLean, R. J. (2023). STEM-skilled parents and autism spectrum disorder in offspring: A case-control study. ResearchGate preprint.

BlueTemplar 2y ago

This article was a lot of work, which, while commendable, looks like it could be easily avoided by the following rule of thumb : If your numbers/data/chart/speech does not feature uncertainty, then (in a professional setting) you should be dismissed as a bullshitter or incompetent. (The importance of thinking about how and how much you might be wrong is drilled out into the minds of students from the start of university for a good reason.)

incomingpain 2y ago

That first graph cuts off at 2018 after showing decrease? But that doesnt jive. The CDC numbers never show any decline. 1 in 44 in 2018, an increase. 1 in 36 in 2020. 1 in 31 in 2022. The common meme is that grandma with her spoon collection or grandpa and his HO scale trains was autism. It's not that autism came out of the blue. Commonly the claim is that awareness and testing is improving. Right but that cant explain that away. The CAUSE of autism must still be present and increasing. It's not vaccines, there's loads of unvaccinated autistic kids. 1 in 50 in somalia have autism but somalia is well known for not being well vaccinated. Its not pesticides, this is anticorrelative when accounting. RFK jr says the cause will be known by the end of the year. I did the research, im fairly confident I know the cause. I wonder if I figured it out.