Scientific American casts doubt on autism claims.

Two recent studies buttress assertions that the autism epidemic may be more illusory than real. First, in 2005 psychiatrist Suniti Chakrabarti of the Child Development Center in Stafford, England, and psychiatrist Eric Fombonne of McGill University conducted an investigation that used rigorous population-based estimates to track the prevalence of autism diagnoses from 1992 to 1998 in a sample of more than 10,000 children in the same area of England. They found no support for a change in prevalence, suggesting that when researchers maintain the same criteria for autism, the rates of diagnosis do not change over time.

Second, a 2006 article by University of Wisconsin–Madison psychologist Paul Shattuck cited “diagnostic substitution”: as the rates of the autism diagnosis increased from 1994 to 2003, the rates of diagnoses of mental retardation and learning disabilities decreased. It is possible that the overall “pool” of children with autismlike features has remained constant but that the specific diagnoses within this pool have switched.

It is still too early to exclude the possibility that autism’s prevalence is growing, but it is unlikely that it is growing as swiftly as many have suggested. As the late Eastern Michigan University sociologist Marcello Truzzi once said, extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. The claim of an enormous epidemic of autism diagnoses is indeed extraordinary. Yet the evidence for this claim leaves much to be desired. 

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 9th, 2007 at 9:54 am and is filed under autism, public attitudes, research news, vaccine. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.  Email This Post