Post by nicole on May 21, 2009 13:27:37 GMT -5
From: Natural Variation - Autism Blog
High Prevalence of Autism in Adults
The following is a bullet-point list of pieces of evidence that strongly suggest the prevalence of ASD in adults is high, at least as high as that found in children. [This evidence was first brought together in Autism "Missed" Often, Even Today.]
* Nylander & Gillberg (2001) screened adult outpatients of a psychiatric hospital and found that 89.5% (17/19) of "definite autistics" did not have a prior autism diagnosis. The most common existing diagnosis in these adult autistics was found to be schizophrenia, which was considerably more common than the diagnosis of autism itself.
* Stahlberg et al. (2004) found that 30% of referred adult patients with ADHD had co-occurring ASD. The prevalence of ADHD in adults is estimated at 4.2% [source].
* Over 25 years ago, Shah et al. (1982) found that 38% of the adult patients at a mental handicap hospital had impairment in two-way social interaction, which was "very significantly associated with abnormalities of communication and imaginative activities." This confirmed an earlier study of mentally retarded children (Wing & Gould, 1979). The prevalence of mental retardation is roughly 1%.
Continue reading.