How common is Asperger's?

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I've noticed recently that there have been more people with AS *I'd call them aspies, but apparently that's not allowed, since I'm NT lol* than I've ever noticed around where I live.
Before I met my bf, I'd never heard of Asperger's in my life. I didn't even fully understand what Autism was. Now, within 5 months, I've heard about 3 other people having it and they all live within a half hour of my house. One lives on my street, actually!
I was just wondering, how common is it? What is the ratio? I know 4 doesn't seem like a lot, but I think it is to me. It's really coincidental, and I'm interested in finding out. Does anyone know?

pretty common in here but cant remember the numbers for the world out there

Wikipedia sez:

As far as I can tell, I'm the only one around my area.

These are things I've heard:
every 10 minutes someone is diagnosed with Autism
1 in 150 people have Autism
1 in 300 people have Asperger's

There are only about 200 people in my school but I know of one other person who has AS besides me. Well, I border between HFA and AS according to my pyschiatrist. I still need to figure out what that means.

I always thought 1 in 150 was the autism spectrum when they said 'autism.'

Autism and the Autism Spectrum Disorders are now the leading disability in the U.S. Education System since the diagnosis of it has became more efficient from the 1980's.

I post a lot on another very closed MB. There is one other AS there besides me, the other non AS knows about him/her but I don't know who it is. There are 162 posters on that board but only about 25 active ones. Everybody is well into adulthood and most of us have posted together for at least 8 years. It's a general interest board, very heavy into IT, financially from millionaire to just unemployed. Some of the unemployed used to be millionaires back in the dot-boom.

IMHO, that's par for the course, most AS (I refer to myself as an aspie) are educated by some means, have something they are really interested in or were, perhaps, probably somewhere between one tenth and a half percent of the total population and most of them don't know they have AS on any but the worst level.

BTW, Bill Gates has been said to be an AS.

We're pod people, slowly replacing NT's with 'differently-abled' exact duplicates...

I thought we were .5% of the population. Who knew?

The 'authorities' will NEVER know how many of us there are, because there are enormous numbers who have been able to camouflage themselves (like me).

My experiences lead me to think that there are many more Aspies in the world than the statistics suggest. I has only been recently (by my time view) that children on the high functioning end of the autism scale have been diagnosed accurately. I would say that most with AS from my generation (I'm 47) never get an accurate diagnosis. The diagnostic focus has been on children in the early developmental stage, so adult criteria for AS are less clear. I believe that many adult aspies are diagnosed with OCD because of the overlap and there are plenty of adult diagnostic criteria.

Growing up in San Diego, I spent several years in special ed classes for Educationally Handicapped, Gifted children. There were two criteria to get in, an IQ test result of over 142 and extreme difficulty in school. Many of my classmates were diagnosed with ADD. At least one of those, I believe was an Aspie based on his physical manifestations (near constant hand flapping and body twisting). The only psychological diagnosis I can remember getting back then was Paranoid Schizophrenic, Childhood Type.

In my mid-thirties, I ended up in the hospital with severe depression and anxiety caused by stress at work. (I can cope with the depression, but the anxiety is unbearable.) At that time I was diagnosed with OCD and discovered that SSRI antidepressants like Zoloft and Prozac just make matters worse and I had to take the old tricyclic antidepressants which have a lot of very unpleasant side effects. OCD explained quite a bit, but it never quite fit. 12 years later and I find myself back in the hospital. Work stress again, but at least this time I saw it coming. This time, a diagnosis of Obsessive Compulsive Personality Disorder. (Never let a doctor give you a formal diagnosis of a personality disorder if you can avoid it. Medical insurance mental health parity laws usually exclude personality disorders from protection. Most doctors will change the diagnosis to a related disorder that does provide protection without batting an eye if you raise the issue.) After getting out that time, the psychiatrist I was seeing for meds, changed my diagnosis to Bipolar Disorder (I have no idea where that came from, since generally I have abnormally low mood swings.). She started me on different drugs for that. First it was Seroquel, which made me manic in the afternoon, so she put me on Abilify, which turned out to be a disaster. Within a month of that I was back in the hospital, worse than ever. It took nearly a month to crawl back out of the hospital this time, but Cymbalta had come out and it works on the depression without screwing up half of my parasympathethic nervous system. Darn good thing as the work stress only escalated steadily after getting out of the hospital.

It has only been recently after reading article after article on the preponderance of AS in IT, that I started in researching AS. After consistently scoring between 38 and 44 on the AQ test and seeing results from the Aspie-quiz online that I seriously considered AS and started to try and get a formal diagnosis. Big problem is that AS specialists invariably don't know what to do with an adult.

Well, it looks like I've run off at the keyboard as usual

I think there are alot of AS-ish people floating around....of my small handfull of close friends and friendly acquaintances, most hover at least near the spectrum...maybe that is why they are my friends. When I ran my venue, we had a strong tendancy to attract alot of ASish sorts...we offered amenities that most other venues don't offer...like a comfy living room seperate from the music with lots of books and toys and stuff..and a vibe that "everyone belonged"...as a result, we became sorta a haven for alot of shy socially akward people...including a good number of diagnosed aspies...thus creating an impression that there are alot of aspies around...

In the UK, the National Autistic Society quote figures around 1 in 100 for those on the autistic spectrum, and suspect that the majority of them are Asperger syndrome. Trouble is, most are undiagnosed/undiscovered as yet,. The guesswork comes from the figures they're getting in schools, and then calculating what that means for the adults that never had a diagnosis but are out there somewhere. Here, there are no central records at all for how many adults there are, or what they're diagnosed with on the autistic spectrum, hence the "I exist" campaign by the National Autistic Society to make people realise the numbers and offer some services or help if people want it.

Probably depends on where you live.

I'm the only 20-year-old person with a type of 'HF' ASD in my city that I know of. About 160.000 people live here.

There may be another exactly my age, probably with another diagnosis though, seeing how he was diagnosed in early childhood.

There are some younger ones with AS, HFA, atypical types...

I know we have quite some autistic people of various ages with very high special needs.

Anyway, can't say it's common where I am in kids and youths.