ADD is not included as a qualifying category for services by the CDDS. Even if it were, I don’t believe this would be relevant at this time.

Many children with autism do not have mental retardation, as you state. Many individuals with autism do not have mental retardation, as you state. That is actually a very important fact that has been explored on blogs by myself and others.

The interesting fact is that the percentage of people identified with autism who have no mental retadation is increasing with time. The younger generation has a much larger percentage of autism without mental retardation than do the adults. Again, this is amongst those who have qualified for services.

Given that, the question has to be asked—are the autistic kids really different than previous generations or is there a difference in identification and qualification for services?

Oddly, niether of those two possibilities are consistent with the “autism is vaccine damage” discussion, which puts forth that there are really more individuals with autism and they are worse off than previous generations cognitively and health wise.

Please also refer to the current literature and funding for the regressive form of Autism which appears to be from an autoimmune disease. Whether this is from an overactive immune system or something else is unclear at this time.

Schwartz, there are a number of ways to normalize this. This way is (a) more simple and (b) includes some balance for changing criteria over time but mostly© it is easier for me to look a. (c) is important because if you look at strict prevalence, you find that people with developmental disabilities die younger. CDDS is doing a much better job at keeping people healthy and alive, but it is pretty obvious in the data that there are not enough older people of all DD’s.

I’m not sure I’m reading this properly, but that graph is showing percentages of overall caseload right?

Don’t we need to get the percentage of cases vs total population to determine if there is an increase in people serviced—and thus indicative of prevalence?

Not that it detracts from your call to identify adults who have been misdiagnosed. I have no doubt that mis-diagnosis has been widespread.

I think you are talking about this story:

http://www.abcnews.go.com/GMA/.....id=4987758

Joseph,

Sorry if I misrepresented what you have stated in the past. Granted, the CDDS data are a difficult set to draw real conclusions from. This is all the more difficult with multiple categories for each child.

The CDDS autism counts do show that the people qualifying under “autism” now have a much lower fraction with “mental retardation” as an additional category.

I (Sullivan) wrote this. I’d point out that Shattuck also has discussed autism and substitution in Pediatrics.

Others have done so as well in other journals. For example, here and here.

This is what Joseph has been pointing out for a long time (along with others) in the blogs, and what people have reported in the literature: people with autism have very likely been mislabeled, their autism label was ”substituted” for a different label.

Thanks for the mention, Sullivan. But to be honest, I’m not sure we’re looking at substitution in CDDS. I don’t think CDDS is a good database to look at substitution. We might be looking at a different phenomenon, interesting in its own right.

Every child who seeks services with CDDS is supposed to have a mental retardation evaluation. Theoretically, the CDDS prevalence of any mental retardation category should be stable (and I’d say it is at the whole population level). Of course, it’s possible that a lot of mental retardation is going into “unknown MR” these days, which you’ll note is a category that is growing. Also, many autistic children who would’ve quickly been considered retarded in the past might be evaluated more carefully these days. In general there might be an aversion to enter “MR” in the evaluation report, especially for young children.

Without knowing the details of how an MR determination is done before it is included in an evaluation report, it’s hard to tell what’s going on with your graph there.