The Trump administration announced this week that it was taking “bold work” to treat “autism spectrum disorder – starting from a new safety sticker on Tilanol and other acetaminophen products that suggest autism. The researchers said that the scientific evidence to do so is weak.
The Minister of Health and Humanitarian Services, Robert F. Kennedy Junior, Federal officials “will be uncompromising and relentlessly in our search for answers” and that they will soon “examine” the role of vaccines, which is related to the association of autism disease The reputation has been distorted on a large scale.
Kennedy has long argued that the increasing diagnosis among children should mean more exposure to some external effect: medicine, chemical, tucin, and vaccine.
“One of the things that I think we need to stay away from today is this ideology that … increases the spread of autism, and the unavoidable increase, is simply manufactures of better diagnoses, better identification, or changing diagnostic standards”, “Kennedy.” He said in April.
Kennedy is right that autism spectrum disorder rates It rose steadily In the United States, since the American centers to control diseases began to track them, from 1 from the age of 150 of the age of 8 in 2000, to 1 in 31 in 2022, the last year when the numbers are available.
But doctors, researchers and psychologists say it is impossible to explain this increase without recognizing two basic facts: the diagnostic definition of autism has expanded significantly to include a much broader group of human behaviors, and we are often looking for it more than we are used to.
“How do we talk about them, and how we described, how to classify them,” said Alan Gell, a nervous psychologist for children at the National Hospital for Children in Washington, DC.
Determine “autism”
The term “autism” appeared for the first time in scientific literature about World War II, when two psychiatrists in different countries chose independently that word to describe two different groups of children.
In 1938, the Austrian pediatrician Hans Asperger used it to prescribe children’s patients in the Vienna clinic who were verbal, and it is often fluent, with unusual social behaviors and the focus of Hoos on very specific topics.
Five years later, American psychiatrist Leo Kenner published a paper about a group of children in his clinic at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore who were socially withdrawn, threw their thinking and very sensitive to stimuli such as bright lights or loud noise. Most of the verbal ability was also limited.
Asperger and Kanner chose the same word to describe these overlapping behaviors: autism. (They borrowed the term from the prescription of the former psychiatrist for the severe social withdrawal in schizophrenia patients.)
This does not mean that children have not acted this way before. This was the first time that doctors started using this word to describe a specific group of child’s behavior.
Over the next few decades, many children who have shown what we understand today have been classified as the features of autism that they have cases that stopped exist as official diagnoses, such as “mental retardation”, “childhood minds” or “schizophrenia, childhood type”.
For the first time autism His own diagnosis In the third edition of 1980 of the diagnostic and statistical guide for mental disorders, the Diagnostic Bible of American Psychiatry. She described a child with autism as the person who, by the age of 2,2, has shown poor communication, extraordinary responses to their environment and lack of interest in other people.
With the passage of contracts, the DSM definition expanded for autism.
The fourth edition, published in 1994, is called additional behaviors: weak relationships, struggle with non -verbal communication and speech patterns different from those that are not compatible with non -spontaneous peers, or nervous style.
It also included a typographical error that may be a decisive driver for diagnoses. The cultural anthropologist Roy Richard Greenc has written in his book “Unstable Minds: Reshaving the Autism World.”
DSM printed definition of autistic disease guarantees any child offered a decrease in social interaction, communication “or” behavior. It was supposed to say social interaction and communication “and” behavior.
The error has not been corrected for six years, and the effect appears to be deep. In 1995, an estimated 1 in every 500 children were diagnosed with autism. By 2000, when the Disease Control Center officially began to track the diagnoses (the text was corrected), it was 1 in every 150.
Access to disadvantaged societies
In 2007, the American Academy of Pediatrics recommended for the first time to be all children It was examined for autism Between the ages of 18 and 24 months as part of regular examinations. Before that, autism was somewhat diagnosed randomly. Not all pediatricians were aware of the first indicators or used the same criteria to determine whether the child should be more evaluated.
Then in 2013, the fifth edition of DSM took what was previously four separate cases – autism disorder, asbirger disorder, thinking disorder and prevalent development disorder – all collapsed in one diagnosis: autism spectrum disorder.
ASD diagnostic standards included a wide range of social differences, communication and sensory interpretation, which, decisively, can be determined at any time in the child’s life. The term is no longer limited to children whose growth has been noticeably left for their counterparts.
Since the adoption of this definition, American schools have become more active about referring a larger group of children to developing neurological assessments. The new DSM language also helped teachers and doctors better understand what was preventing some children in deprived societies from prosperity.
“in the past, [autism was] Children who are struggling with things such as behavioral disorders, attention deficit or language delay, often were often diagnosed with mental consequences or behavioral forests, “” “the obstruction of the white child”, because you have found a few black and brown children who have been identified. “
In a sign that things have turned, The latest survey of the risk of controlling diseases For the first time, I found a higher spread of autism in children with white children: 3.66 %, 3.82 % and 3.30 % for black, Asians and Latinians, respectively, compared to 2.77 % of white children.
“Many people think,” Oh, no, what does this mean? This is terrible. ”But it is really really positive. [and] “Other groups also,” said Christina Lopez, a co -professor at Arizona State University, who is studying autism in deprived societies in societies suffering from a lack of services.
The issue of distress
Today’s autism diagnosis can be applied to people who are able to graduate from college, deal with professional positions and talk about their autism, as well as people who need 24 hours care and cannot speak at all.
This includes the people who were diagnosed when they were young they develop at a significantly different pace from their peers, and people who adopted the diagnosis of autism in adulthood as the best description of how they are linked to the world. Diagnostics of adults between the ages of 26 and 34 years alone 450 % increased Between 2011 and 2022, according to One big study It was published last year in the American medical magazine.
Kennedy was not right when he said in April that “most cases are now severe.”
The 2016 CDC data review found that approximately 26.7 % of children with autism from 8 years of autism have what some defenders in the name of “deep autism” indicate the end of the spectrum, which often includes serious disruption behaviors such as seizures, self -behavior, and intellectual impotence.
Mourin Durkin, a professor of health sciences at the University of Wisconsin Madison, said that the rate of children with deep autism has been unchanged since the Center for Disease Control began to follow it. In fact, the highest rate of new diagnoses was among children with moderate restrictions.
For many researchers and preachers, the Trump administration’s focus on autism has sparked mixed feelings. For years, many have pressured more attention to this situation and the people whose lives affect.
I have now arrived, thanks to the administration that has played wrong information while cutting support to science.
“They tried to this audience with the idea of autism as a threat to the nation Self -invitation network for autism. “It is time for this administration to stop spreading wrong information about autism, and begins to age policies that will already benefit our society.”
This article was reported with the support of the Christie Hammam fund issued at the Christie Humam Center issued.