This week, the Trump administration announced that it was taking “bold actions” to solve the “epidemic” of an autistic spectrum disorder – starting with a new safety mark on Tilenol and other products of acetaminophen, which involve communication with autism. Researchers said that scientific evidence for this is weak.
Minister of Health and Social Services Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., said that federal officials “will be uncompromising and tirelessly in our search for answers”, and that they will soon “carefully study” the role of vaccines, whose alleged connection with autism was widely discreditedField
Kennedy has long claimed that the growth of diagnoses among us children should mean a greater effect of some external influence: the drug, chemical, toxin, vaccine.
“One of the things that I think that we need to move away from today is an ideology that … the spread of autism, a tireless increase is just artifacts of the best diagnoses, the best recognition or change in diagnostic criteria”, Kennedy He said in AprilField
Kennedy is right that the speed of an autistic spectrum disorder We got up steadily In the United States, since the United States has begun to monitor them, from 1 out of 150-year-olds in 2000 to 1 in 31 in 31 in 2022, the last year for which the numbers are available.
But doctors, researchers and psychologists say that it is impossible to interpret this increase without recognition of two important facts: the diagnostic definition of autism has expanded significantly to include a much wider range of human behavior, and we look for it more often than we are accustomed.
“People have not changed so much,” said Alan Herber, a pediatric neuropsychologist from a children's national hospital in Washington, the District of Colombia, “but as we talk about them, how we describe them, how we classify them, has actually changed a lot over the years.”
Definition of “autism”
The term “autism” first appeared in the scientific literature around the Second World War, when two psychiatrists in different countries independently chose this word in order to describe two different groups of children.
In 1938, the Austrian Pediatrician Hans Asperger used it to describe children's children in his Vienna clinic, who were verbal, often free, with unusual social behavior and obsessive attention to very specific subjects.
Five years later, the American psychiatrist Leo Kanner published an article about a group of children in his clinic in the John Hopkins hospital in Baltimore, which were socially removed, hard in their thinking and extremely sensitive to stimuli, such as bright lights or loud noises. Most also had a limited verbal language ability.
Both Asperger and Kanner chose the same word to describe these overlapping behavior: autism. (They borrowed this term from the description of an earlier psychiatrist of extreme social care in patients with schizophrenia.)
This does not mean that children never acted like that before. This was only the first time when the doctors began to use this word to describe a specific set of children's behavior.
Over the next few decades, many children who showed what we understand today as autistic features were marked as having conditions that ceased to exist as formal diagnoses, such as “mental backwardness”, “childhood psychosis” or “schizophrenia, type of childhood”.
Autism made his debut as His own diagnosis In the third edition of 1980, the diagnostic and statistical leadership of mental disorders is the American psychiatric Bible. He described an autistic child as one who, at the age of 2.5 years, showed a violation of communication, unusual answers to the environment and lack of interest in other people.
Since decades lasted, the definition of DSM autism has expanded.
The fourth edition, published in 1994, is called additional behavior: violated relations, the fight against non -verbal communication and speech models that are different from non -oppatical or neurotypic peers.
It also included a typo that would be an important driving force of diagnoses, wrote the cultural anthropologist Rihi Richard Grinker in his book “Nearby: reprinting the world of autism”.
The print definition of DSM autism included any child who demonstrated violations in social interaction, communication “or” behavior. This was supposed to say social interaction, communication “and” behavior.
The error was left without adjustment for six years, and the influence turned out to be deep. In 1995, according to estimates 1 out of every 500 children, autism was diagnosed. By 2000, when the CDC formally began to track the diagnoses (and the text was fixed), it was 1 out of every 150.
Reaching insufficiently served communities
In 2007, the American Academy of Pediatrics recommended for the first time so that all the children were Awritten on autism At the age of 18 to 24 months as part of their regular inspections. Prior to this, autism was diagnosed somewhat by chance. Not all pediatricians were familiar with the earliest indicators or used the same criteria to determine whether to evaluate the child.
Then, in 2013, the fifth edition of DSM accepted what was previously four separate states – an autistic disorder, Asperger’s disorder, a disintegrate disorder of childhood and common development disorders – and turned them all into one diagnosis: an autistic spectrum disorder.
Diagnostic criteria for ASD included a wide range of differences in social, communication and sensory interpretation, which, which, which, is especially important, could be determined at any time in the life of the child. The term was no longer limited only by children whose development was noticeably behind the development of their peers.
Since this definition was adopted, US schools have become more active in relation to a wider range of children to assess the development of the nervous system. The new DSM language also helped teachers and clinicians better understand what holds some children in destitute communities from prosperity.
“In the past, [autism was] Called the “white child’s disability” because you found that you have discovered so few black and brown children, ”said Shanter Alexander, an assistant professor of school psychology at Howard University. Color children who fought things such as behavioral malfunctions, attention deficits or language delays, she said, often diagnosed with violations of intellectual abilities or behavioral disorders.
In the sign that everything has changed The last CDC survey For the first time, they found a higher prevalence of autism in children in color than in white children: 3.66%, 3.82% and 3.30% for black, Asian and Latin American children, respectively, compared with 2.77% of white children.
“Many people think:“ Oh, no, what does this mean? It's horrible “. But in fact, this is really positive. [and] Other groups, ”said Christina Lopez, associate professor of the University of Arizona, which studies autism in insufficiently served communities.
The problem of severity
The diagnosis of autism today can be applied to people who can finish college, occupy professional positions and eloquently talk about their autism, as well as people who need a 24-hour care and cannot speak at all.
It includes people who were diagnosed when they were babies developing at a noticeably different pace from their peers, and people who perceived the diagnosis of autism in adulthood as the best description of how they relate to the world. Diagnoses for us adults aged 26 to 34 years increased by 450% in the period from 2011 to 2022, according to One big study Published last year in the journal of the American medical ASSN.
Kennedy was not right when in April he said that “most cases are serious now.”
In 2016, the CDC data review showed that approximately 26.7% of 8-year-olds with autism had what some defenders call “deep autism”, the end of the spectrum, which often includes a serious disconnection of behavior, such as cramps, independent behavior and intellectual disability.
According to Morin Durkin, a professor of health and pediatrics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, an indicator of children with deep autism has remained practically unchanged since the CDC began to track it. Indeed, the highest level of new diagnoses was among children with easy restrictions, she said.
For many researchers and defenders, the attention of the Trump administration on autism caused mixed emotions. For many years, many have lobbying for more attention to this state and people whose life affects this.
Now he arrived thanks to the administration that played false information while The result of support for scienceField
“They tried to panic at the public with the presentation of an epidemic of autism as a threat to the nation, when such an epidemic does not exist today – more people have been diagnosed with autism, because we have wider diagnostic criteria and they better discover it,” said Colin Killik, executive director Independent law enforcement network of autisticThe field “The time has come for this administration to cease to disseminate misinformation about autism and begins to accept a policy that will actually benefit our community.”
This article was reported with the support of the USC Annenberg Fundship Fellowsip FundShip Fundship Center for Health Journalism.
