Autism May Be Far More Common, Study Suggests An exhaustive
study of autism in one community has found that the disorder is
far more common than suggested by earlier research. The study of
55,000 children in Goyang, South Korea, found that 2.64 percent
— one in every 38 children — had an autism spectrum disorder.
"That is two and a half times what the estimated prevalence is
in the United States," says Roy Richard Grinker, a professor of
anthropology at The George Washington University and one of the
study's authors. The South Korean study probably produced such a
high figure because it screened a lot of kids who seemed to be
doing OK and included in-person evaluations of any child
suspected of having autism, Grinker says. "Two-thirds of the
children with autism that we ended up identifying were in
mainstream schools, unrecognized, untreated," he says. The team
of Korean and American scientists who carried out the study,
published online in the American Journal of Psychiatry, say the
result doesn't mean there