An Overview of Recent Autism Statistics in The US


Defined Tag: Autism Statistics.

With recent Autism statistics showing that the number of children diagnosed with an Autism Spectrum Disorder has increased every year after the spike in cases in the mid 1990’s, many young families are rightly concerned to discover as much as they can about this disorder. The overall ratio of sufferers to healthy children has risen to a massive one in every one hundred and fifty; which is way up from two decades ago when that figure was closer to one in ten thousand. While recent research possibly links it to heavy metal toxicity, environmental factors, and Lyme Disease, there is yet no solid understanding of its direct causes or prevention. According to the United States Department of Education, and other governmental agencies, the incidence of Autism Spectrum Disorder is going up by a rate of ten to seventeen percent each year; with an estimate by The Center for Disease Control estimating a figure as high as one and a half million for the number of cases of people currently affected by Autism.

These figures cover a range of disorders, collectively called the Autism Spectrum Disorders, which include Classic Autism or Kanner's Syndrome, Aspergers Disorder, Rett's Syndrome, Childhood Disintegrative Disorder (CDD), or Heller’s Syndrome, and Pervasive Developmental Disorder Not Otherwise Specified, or PDDNOS. While each has a distinct diagnosis and is characterised separately there are common elements: the most significant being their pervasive, rather than specific, quality.

Further statistical details show us that boys are four times more likely to suffer from Autism Disorders than girls and, in children overall, Autism has become more common than childhood cancer with between two and six children pout of every thousand developing Autism. To attempt to understand this figure more clearly: if four million children are born in the United States each year, we can expect about twenty four thousand of these children to be diagnosed with an Autism Spectrum Disorder. And if we were to assume this as a constant rate over the past twenty years then a rough estimate would suggest that up to five hundred thousand individuals living in the United States, below the age of twenty one, have Autism according to these Autism Statistics.