this post was submitted on 23 Sep 2025
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Yeah Autism rates are going up in all groups because people are getting diagnoses. This is partly about better awareness but also partly about money - there is an incentive to expand the diagnosis, diagnose more people and treat more people, which somewhat muddies the water. Autistic Spectrum Disorder first appeared in the American DSM in 2012, unifying 5 existing conditions into one, and then it moved into the international ICD in 2018 (going live in 2022). It is no wonder awareness has gone up, and infrastructure for diagnosis has rolled out.
We're not seeing an increase in Autism, we're seeing an increase in the diagnosis of autism. This graph just shows how stupid and dumbed down the CDC and the White House is under this cretinous president.
It's probably more than just better diagnosis.
"Advanced Parental Age" has a significant body of work behind it, and people are having kids quite a bit older than they used to, because... you know... gestures broadly at how fucked up the world is
My daughter's autistic and we were 39 (wife) and 42 (me) when we had her. OTOH, we were two years older and my son isn't autistic.
Statistical distributions suck, especially when we want a clear-cut cause-and-effect silver bullet. My only sister has two autistic sons, and my wife and I were 7 years older than she was when we had our son and he isn't autistic (as far as we can tell thus far).
As a brother and uncle, I have incredible empathy for the desire and frustration to just get a clear answer on this. And I recognize these feeling however intense are orders of magnitude less than for a parent. It's not like lead or asbestos or thaledimide or radiation.
Best we've got is a confluence of factors, not the least being family history knowing full well how bad diagnosis has been historically.
It's so incredibly predatory to dump the science in the trash and just say "it was Tylenol all along".
Absolutely.
Not sure about that. It can be both.
Sure, it's possible, but I'm not sure there's data to support the idea of increasing rates of autism. The increase in diagnosis rates is way too strong of a confounder