What is Autism, Really?

This blog was written by Beth Lambert and originally published on epidemicanswers.org; you can continue reading after the excerpt below by clicking on the button at the bottom.

Has Autism Increased Just Due to Better Diagnosis?

Autism is a term that is reasonably new in the modern lexicon. While the term autism was first coined in 1912, a neurological presentation that has similar characteristics to what we call autism has likely been around for a very long time in human history. However, this type of neurological presentation (and associated behaviors) was exceedingly rare in the past. I mean, the 2-in-10,000 kind of rare.

Yes, we are better at diagnosing, but this does not explain the jump from 2 in 10,000 to 1 in 31 in just 50 years. There are people that will tell you that we have always had 1 in 31 children with autism in the human population . . . that 3% of people have always been autistic, despite the fact that there is no epidemiological evidence to support this statement.

No one challenges the real rise in life-threatening food allergies in children over the last 50 years. We can track hospital and ER admissions, the results of validated laboratory tests, and deaths from anaphylaxis to objectively conclude that the rate of life-threatening food allergies has grown exponentially in recent decades.

With autism, the diagnosis is subjective and based on a set of criteria used by a diagnostician who employs personal judgement to determine a positive/negative diagnosis. What’s more, the diagnostic criteria have changed over time, making the waters muddier. There has never been an objective diagnostic test like a blood test that would help make the diagnosis indisputable and thus easier to track prevalence over time. As a result, the conventional narrative is that we’ve always had this much autism, it’s just that we “missed” them. We didn’t diagnose them.