March 30, 2012 CDC Releases New Report on Autism Prevalence in
U.S. Researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public
Health contributed to a new Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention (CDC) report that estimates the prevalence of Autism
Spectrum Disorders (ASD) as affecting 1 in 88 U.S. children
overall, and 1 in 54 boys. This is the third such report by the
CDC’s Autism and Developmental Disabilities Monitoring Network
(ADDM), which has used the same surveillance methods for more
than a decade. Previous ADDM reports estimated the rate of ASDs
at 1 in 110 children in the 2009 report that looked at data from
2006, and 1 in 150 children in the 2007 report, which covered
data from 2002. The current prevalence estimate, which analyzed
data from 2008, represents a 78 percent increase since 2002, and
a 23 percent increase since 2006. ASDs include diagnoses of
autistic disorder, Asperger disorder, and Pervasive
Developmental Disorder-Not Otherwise Specified (PDD-NOS). ASDs
encompass a wide spectrum of