Children frequently referred to the clinic at Stanford who are misdiagnosed as autistic include those with severe anxiety symptoms, early onset personality disorders, and reactive attachment disorders.
Children in the latter category, often adopted from overseas, have many features that could lead a clinician to mistakenly diagnose autism, including severe social deficits and stereotypical behaviors, he said.
Methodological factors may also have contributed to apparent increases in autism prevalence, as depicted in a recent article, “The autism epidemic: fact or artifact?” (J. Am. Acad. Child Adolesc. Psychiatry 2007;46:721–30).