via medicalxpress:
New federal studies co-authored by autism experts at Rutgers found that more children have been diagnosed with autism than at any time since monitoring began more than two decades ago.
According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), about 4% of 8-year-old boys and 1% of 8-year-old girls, have autism in the U.S. These estimates are the highest since the CDC’s Autism and Developmental Disabilities Monitoring (ADDM) Network was created in 2000.
Biennial studies from the ADDM Network, which analyzed data from 2020, were coauthored by Walter Zahorodny, director of the New Jersey Autism Study at the Rutgers New Jersey Medical School and Josephine Shenouda, a Rutgers epidemiologist.
The first study, the CDC’s 2020 autism prevalence report, found that California set new records, diagnosing 45% more boys with autism than any other state in the network. Nearly 7% of all 8-year-old boys in the San Diego region are estimated to have autism spectrum disorder (ASD), according to the report.