A new study has found that while statistics suggest the number of children suffering from autism is on the rise, in reality there’s just more of them that are being diagnosed with the disease due to technological advancements and the disappearance of a number of former mental conditions that were previously attributed to children who simply had autism.
For instance, some of the newly diagnosed autistic children used to be diagnosed as having “intellectual disability”.
Field experts assure that there’s no “epidemic” of autism that parents should be worried about. But if one were to look at the enrollment figures of special education programs, they’d notice that the number increased by 97 percent (97%) between the years of 2000 and 2010. The number essentially went from being 93.624 in 2000 to being 419.647 in 2010.
A team of researchers from Penn State University set out to investigate the mater and concluded that somewhere around two thirds of the rise in autism diagnoses can be blamed on reclassification.
To reach this conclusion, Santhosh Girirajan, lead author and assistant professor of molecular biology, biochemistry and of anthropology from Penn State University, led a group of experts in the quest for answers.
The researchers looked at data gathered on special-education enrollment programs over the course of eleven (11) years. They ended up examining the cases of more than six (6) million kids across the United States.
What they found was that the increase in kids diagnosed with autism was equal to the decrease in kids diagnosed with other mental conditions such as intellectual disability.
The study team concluded that modern day medical professionals feel a lot more comfortable diagnosing kids with autism rather than with some other mental condition that the medical community would have attributed to their patients in the past.
Professor Girirajan gave a statement saying that “researchers have been struggling to sort disorders into categories” for a long time. Most of the time they can only use their own observations, but autism is tricky as “individual can show a different combination of features”.
The paper was published earlier this month, in the American Journal of Medical Genetics.
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