1 in 91, 1 in 58 boys..

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A study put forth by the American Academy of Pediatrics

http://www.medicalhomeinfo.org/health/A ... andout.pdf

I don't think it's that frequent... at my school, there are 7 people with ASD (with me included) or 6 (not counting me), which is about 1 in 150. The total population of my school is around 1100 students.
(Note: I've been unofficially diagnosed by my school psychologist.)

Are you just counting the people who get special ed thanks to the ASDs? Lots of autistic kids don't need extra help, and if there were three more who weren't getting special ed then it'd be the 1:100 ratio again. The survey did ask, "Has your child ever been diagnosed with an ASD?", which of course includes any child that has been diagnosed and lost the diagnosis later, naturally no longer requiring special ed at school.

Anyhow, hasn't Great Britain known this for ages? I seem to recall their ratio has been 1:100 for quite some time.

Once again, this isn't "more people being born with autism"; it's "autism is more well-known". We know this because, if there were new cases, then you'd have more five year olds diagnosed than seven year olds, more seven than twelve, etc.; but the numbers hold pretty steady across the age range of people who are younger than the mid-teens (older than that, and you start to get the "diagnosable in childhood but missed due to low awareness" cases, which lower the numbers). The new diagnoses are coming from all age ranges, which points to the obvious conclusion of greater awareness.

For comparison, about three in a hundred people are developmentally delayed (though naturally there is some overlap).

Last edited by Callista on 18 Oct 2009, 6:09 pm, edited 1 time in total.

There are LFAs at your school? Put it in another way: in the school system where you are, the LFAs attend regular school or they go to special schools?

If LFAs go the special schools, and if LFAs be 1/4 of the people with ASD, we will have 1 in 120 people with ASD at regular schools. It is a bit closer to the "your" 1/150.

It is because now they are allowing more children with only minimal "symptoms," even just one or two, to be labelled with an Autism Spectrum Disorder.

No, there aren't any LFAs at my school specifically, but there are certain schools here with special education classes that are suited for LFAs and other people with more severe developmental disorders.

Last edited by MathGirl on 18 Oct 2009, 6:18 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Yes, I'm not sure if I agree with that. A child with a simple speech delay and no other signs of autism shouldn't be labeled with an ASD. Nor should the many quite typical children who are fond of stimming. Etc.

Are you sure there are no others? I don't think the school knows about my diagnosis. You wouldn't know about me.

Wow, didn't think there were that many of us.

I personally have a hard time believing statistics of any sort. I'd like to think that there are that many of us but I don't.

I think it's a lot more than the one in 150/200/250 that most people say.

I've seen many people that seem to think the same way as I do. 2 in my class of 15 at school for example. One was a girl who always said weird and insensitive things and was really smart in maths. And a guy who just never talked to anyone and when he did it was like he didn't want to or couldn't do it well. His sister in the class below talked more but really strangely. Another guy I knew hated certain foods remarking that he didn't like the texture as well as having some other strange habits. Another guy in the class above me was Autistic

Like has been said, many remain undiagnosed because they don't act up or because they are closer to the border of AS and NT.

Given that it's all but proven to be genetic, 1 in 58 and 91 doesn't sound too far fetched!

Infantile Autism (ie Low Functioning, Severe) represents .5 in 1000 students.

The rest fall into higher functioning categories such as PDD-NOS, AS, etc.

Statistically speaking, most of the people with ASD are really just kids who are normal to high intelligence, with poorly developed social skillset. In fact if you take most honors classes, you will probably have 1-5 kids in a class of 30 with an ASD, add in for every honors class there is probably 2-4 regular classes, the stastics can very well be feasible. The problem is not the stastics, its how ASD are being portrayed in public, if people understand that is more likely that a person with an ASD may resemble your over-educated/under-employed/under-utilized individual, it might make for a better understanding in the public, and less of a push for a "cure".

I'm pretty sure that there is a law across North America that all of the students who are diagnosed with a condition that affects their ability to learn in a regular classroom are required to have an IEP. Asperger's is considered to be a learning disability, because NLD is part of it. My special ed teacher is the one who makes the IEPs, so I asked him about the number of people with an ASD.

Oh, and another thing. Many people get misdiagnosed because the criteria are very broad. I've met a couple of people at my school who seem to have a similar way of thinking to mine, but it doesn't mean that they're on the spectrum.

What do you mean learning disability? There are different categories for IEP's. I've been on Autism Spectrum category for AS, and Emotional Disability for anxiety. AS isn't in the learning disorder category.

I think it's more likely to be 1 in 100 or 1 in 150. Once a newspaper stated it was 1 in 60, which doesn't sound correct to me.