Monkey business. Rhesus monkeys youth who receive human antibodies in utero antibrain acting strangely in social situations.
Nancy Collins / Creative Commons
The number of US school children in special education programs because of autism more than tripled between 00 and 2010, to nearly 420,000. But a new study supports a large part of this increase probably came as educators swapped for another diagnosis. The overall percentage of children diagnosed with a collection of brain development problems including autism remained unchanged, suggesting that children who used to be labeled with terms such as "intellectual disability" were actually autistic.
"If you asked me, is it a real increase in the prevalence of autism? Maybe it is, but probably much less than the magnitude reported," said Santhosh Girirajan, a geneticist at the Pennsylvania State University (Penn State), University Park.
in the new study, and Girirajan colleagues combed through data collected in each state for approximately 6.2 million American school children with disabilities who are enrolled in special education programs. The information is collected annually in federal Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. Based on the diagnosis, each child was assigned to one of 13 broader categories, ranging from autism to physical challenges like blindness.
Between 00 and 2010, the number of children in the category of autism more than tripled from 93,624 in 00 to 419,647 a decade later. However, almost two thirds of this increase was associated with a decrease in the rate at which children have been labeled as having a "developmental disability". The number of children in this category increased from 637,270 to 457,478.
The data indicate that the increase in autism is partly the result of students being moved from one category to another, said Girirajan.
for him, the lesson is that autism includes a medley of symptoms. It can also occur in hand with other conditions, including developmental disabilities, epilepsy and hyperactivity disorder attention deficit. This mixture makes it difficult to identify how common autism really is, and lends itself to the development of diagnostics, he said.
as autism rates have skyrocketed in special education programs in the United States, the number of children labeled "intellectual disability" has fallen, suggesting that most of the increased from autism shift diagnostics. Penn State 
The findings, reported today in the American Journal of Medical Genetics Part B: Neuropsychiatric Genetics underline the growing acceptance within the institutions and families a condition, once either ignored or avoided as a mark of shame, says Roy Richard Grinker, an anthropologist at George Washington University in Washington, DC, who has studied rates of autism and wrote a book on autism Minds Unstrange . He points to a recent Washington Post article on the emergence of autistic adults groups pleading for acceptance through events like "Autistic Pride Day."
"Qu ' is this document says is that autism is increasingly adopted as a useful framework acceptable, less stigmatizing, "said Grinker, who has an autistic daughter.
There are certain risk factors that might explain a small amount of the increase in autism, said Jon Baio, a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) epidemiologist and lead researcher on a program autism surveillance. This includes children born prematurely or underweight. A recent study in the journal Molecular Psychiatry found that older fathers and older mothers or adolescents had a higher risk of having children with autism.
But Baio, said much of the increase they have seen since 00 has increased awareness of autism and more sensitive screening tools. For example, he said, there are now more cases of autism with milder symptoms, such as normal or above normal intellectual capacity. At the same time, the number of children identified with autism by community experts such as school special education programs examined by the Penn State scientists came close to matching the most complete screening methods CDC.
the possibility that autism figures jumped at children as diagnoses are changed was discussed, said Annette Estes, director of the University of Washington Autism Center in Seattle. The use of wide special education database Penn State study makes a compelling argument that happens, she said. But it does not specify all of the increase. "People who are in the field are generally consensus that the majority of the increase is due to improvements in our ability to diagnose and identify people with autism in a wider spectrum that used to be possible" , Estes said. "But there is that part of an increase not reflected in a number of statistical studies that are made."
* Fixed, July 23 24:09 pm.. the title of this article was changed the original title referred to autism as a disease
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