Autism News & Update: CDA Report Shows US Autism Rate Unchanged

A new U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) report has been issued with help from the researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. The new CDC report shows that the prevalence of autism is largely unchanged from two years ago.

According to Science Daily, the CDC report found that the autism spectrum disorder (ASD) rate is at 1.46 percent or one in 68 children. The rate is one in 189 among girls and one in 42 among boys. This means that boys are 4.5 times more likely to be identified with autism than girls.

Rates of ASD have been rising since the 1960s.  It is unclear how much of this rise is due to actual cases increasing, to more children being diagnosed with ASD, or a combination of both. The CDC's first autism prevalence report was based on 2000 and 2002 data and it was released in 2007. At the time the CDA report found that one in 150 children had ASD.

The CDC collected data at 11 regional monitoring sites for this new report. The sites are part of the Autism and Developmental Disabilities Monitoring (ADDM) Network.

Dr Li-Ching Lee, Ph.D., Sc.M., the principal investigator for the Maryland-ADDM and a psychiatric epidemiologist with the Bloomberg School's departments of Epidemiology and Mental Health, said that the research team did not observe a significant increase in the overall prevalence rates in the monitoring sites. However, the researchers found "disparity among racial and ethnic groups."  The prevalence in Maryland was 1.82 percent or one in 55 children, with one in 161 among girls and one in 34 among boys.

The CDA reports have used the same surveillance methods for more than a decade and the current one is the sixth report by the CDC's Autism and Developmental Disabilities Monitoring Network (ADDM). The report called "Prevalence of Autism Spectrum Disorder -- Autism and Developmental Disabilities Monitoring Network, 11 Sites, United States, 2012" is published online on the CDC website.