The Rise of Autism #
April 16th, 2008 | In Worth Knowing
Preliminary evidence suggest that autism isn’t actually more common today, just more commonly diagnosed:
But the rise in the number of recorded cases is real enough. In Britain, for example, the rate of diagnosis has risen from 50 per 100,000 in 1990 to 400 per 100,000 today. That must have a cause. And one popular hypothesis is that this cause, too, is fashion…
The result was that almost a third of her volunteers looked, from the modern point of view, misclassified. Eight fully met the modern criteria for autism. A further four fell into what is known as the autistic spectrum, evincing signs of autism short of the full-blown syndrome.