New Data Show One in 31 Kids Has Autism

Autism prevalence in the U.S. has increased from one in 36 children to one in 31, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) latest Autism and Developmental Disabilities Monitoring (ADDM) Network survey. The autism epidemic is running rampant,” said U.S. Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. “One in 31 American children born in 2014 are disabled by autism. That’s up significantly from two years earlier and nearly five times higher than when the CDC first started running autism surveys in children born in 1992. Prevalence for boys is an astounding one in 20 and in California it’s one in 12.5.” 

The new ADDM report was conducted in 2022 across 16 sites in the U.S. and surveyed children aged 8 years born in 2014. This latest autism prevalence is 4.8 times higher than in the first ADDM survey 22 years ago, when prevalence was one in 150 children. 

The increase in autism spectrum disorder (ASD) prevalence cannot be solely attributed to the expansion of diagnoses to include higher functioning children. On the contrary, the percentage of ASD cases with higher IQs (>85) has decreased steadily over the last six ADDM reports to 36.1 percent in the 2022 survey. Nearly two-thirds of children with ASD in the latest survey had either severe or borderline intellectual disability (ID). 

Minority children were more severely affected. Black, Asian and Hispanic children in the 2022 survey had higher overall ASD prevalence (3.66 percent, 3.82 percent and 3.30 percent, respectively) than White children (2.77 percent), and were also more likely to have a more severe form of autism. Among Black, Asian and Hispanic children, 78.9 percent, 66.5 percent and 63.9 percent, respectively, had either severe or borderline ID, compared to 55.6 percent of Whites. 

A deeply troubling finding in the survey is that among children aged 4 years born in 2018, the overall ASD prevalence rate is 2.93 percent (one in 34). Prevalence rates typically rise as children age from 4 to 8 and more cases are diagnosed. Compared to the 8-year-olds in the new report, the 4-year-olds showed wider differences by race and ethnicity. Overall prevalence among Black, Asian and Hispanic children in this group was 3.5 percent, 3.11 percent and 3.82 percent, respectively, compared to 2.04 percent among White children.