Jill Escher, president of the Autism Society of San Francisco, has commented upon the results of this survey saying that the “decade to decade” numbers are the ones health experts should be anxious about, because they reflect a dramatic increase in the number of children living with a very serious neurological condition.
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The last National Health Interview Survey (NHIS) was conducted by the CDC for the years 2011 through 2013, but for the 2014 survey, the CDC included what Forbes reports to have been a tweak that “is the reason” for 2014’s almost one percent climb in 2014.
Those changes might have caused more of the parents to say their child was diagnosed with autism or another disorder in development.
But the increase is likely due to changes in the way parents and guardians were surveyed, according to a new report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Recent years have witnessed a steady rise in the number of autistic kids.
But numbers don’t make a difference to parents who have children on the autism spectrum. In 2007, the CDC estimated 1 in 150 children had autism. But even though the general public is more aware of autism, the government believes many parents do not completely understand the potential signs of ASD. But despite evidence that a few children grow out of an ASD diagnosis or improve dramatically with treatment, those children will still be counted. The percentage of parents who said a child had been diagnosed with an intellectual disability also dropped, from 1.27% in 2011-13 to 1.1% in the 2014 survey. “And while the sudden jump has been a strain on parents, children, and schools, Rosanoff feels better about the new statistics, saying that they “[are] likely a more accurate representation of autism prevalence in the United States”.
Experts believe that more resources need to be allocated to this wide-spread problem in order to come up with ways to tackle this issue – otherwise it may soon get out of our hands.
At the same time, researchers found that an autism diagnosis rarely comes on its own, as children with autism are also more prone to developing conditions such as learning disabilities.
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Apparently, both surveys initially asked about potential intellectual disabilities, but while the 2011-2013 survey then went on by inquiring about developmental delays and specific disorders such as ASD, the more recent survey switched the order of the questions, focusing on ASD specifically and only afterwards on other impairments. This idea is supported by the fact that the prevalence of other similar disorders seems to have decreased from 4.84% to 3.57%.
