a new federal report found.
The number suggests the ASD diagnosis rate has continued its steady rise since 2000-2002, when only 0.67 per 1,000 8-year-olds were believed to have the condition.
The report also found that while the gap in diagnosis rates between blacks and whites has dwindled, ASD prevalence “continues to vary among certain racial/ethnic groups and communities.” Indeed, the ASD rate approached 3% in some communities, according to the report published April 28 in Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.
The findings are based on statistics gathered by the Autism and Developmental Disabilities Monitoring Network, which uses multiple strategies to track ASD diagnoses among 8-year-olds in Arizona, Arkansas, Colorado, Georgia, Maryland, Minnesota, Missouri, New Jersey, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Wisconsin.
The network, which started its work in 2000, monitors 8-year-old children because that’s the age when ASD prevalence is thought to be at its highest.
The new report, by Jon Baio of the National Center on Birth Defects and Developmental Disabilities and his associates relied upon ASD definitions from DSM-IV-TR and DSM-5. While the definitions seem to be quite different, the report states, “the prevalence of ASD and characteristics of children identified by each case definition were similar in 2014.” Prevalence estimates in the report are only based on DSM-IV-TR criteria.
In total, the report for 2014 tracked 325,483 children aged 8 years, which accounted for 8% of the entire U.S. population in that age group. Of those, 5,473 were determined to have ASD.