You made the following observation regarding the issues of diagnostic criteria:

“(1) Diagnostic criteria have changed over some part of the period during which increases have been observed. The diagnostic criteria for autistic disorder were broadened over time”.

Broadening of diagnostic criteria has been invoked to explain the appearance of a global autism pandemic. ‘Broadening’ implies a base where autism is narrowly defined and broadening the criteria will be more inclusive for the larger group of children who were in trouble developmentally but defied categorization. In fact, ‘broadening of diagnostic criteria’ is linguistic acrobatics. The narrow definition of ‘autism’ was not broadened, it was completly abandoned in 1994 with the removal of Kanner’s criteria.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18427975

Kanner in 1965 also noticed this trend for defining some children using the diagnostic cliche ‘Pseudo-autism’. He wrote in 1965:

“To complicate things further, Crewel, in the hope of avoiding confusion between true autism and other conditions with autistic-like features, suggested the term pseudo-autism for the latter. Even this term came to be employed haphazardly, and conditions variously described as hospitalism, anaclitic depression, and separation anxiety were put under the heading of pseudo-autism”

My spouse who has been in special education for approimately 30 years now seems to hold a
different opinion on this matter. She would argue based on her own experience throughout
the years that autism or prevalance of autism has increased. She sees more children
today then she did before with an accurate autism label. This is by no means a irrefutable
evidence, however in her small study group (her experience in a southern california region for
the last 20 years)she has noticed an increase in the amount of children identified as Autistic.

This could be a regional issue where she happens to teach, but non the less she
sees more children with autism traits today then ever before. This observation has nothing to do
with changes in diganostic criteria or official reporting methods being adopted.

The possibility of “gross misdiagnosis” is a valid issue globally as RAJ stated.

Keep in mind that this personal observation makes no conclusion as to reason or cause, just that
there does seem to be a greater prevalance today then say 10-15 years prior.

Reporting issues (by parent or foster parent) have a great deal to do the misunderstanding
origins and family history. Many foster parents are more than willing to identify the foster child
in thier care as a drug baby or that mom or dad where drug addicts etc. etc. This sometimes
is due to the fact that subsidy of the foster care for the child is regulated by degree of disability
(the worse they are the more money they get).
Many biological parents tend to be a bit more closer to the hip as to information
about any circumstances such as pre-term and drug usages prior to birth for obvious reasons.

These studies require a lot of investigation as to source of the information obtained.
I have not read some of the studies here yet but there seems to be a real issue still
unresolved as to a more reliable measure of incidence.

http://neurodiversity.com/library_kanner_1965.html

Kanner wrote :
“Moreover, it became a habit to dilute the original concept of infantile autism by diagnosing it in many disparate conditions which show one or another isolated symptom found as a part feature of the overall syndrome. Almost overnight, the country seemed to be populated by a multitude of autistic children, and somehow this trend became noticeable overseas as well”.

The trend to misdiagnosis of autism can be traced to various editions of the APA’s DSM’s starting in 1980:

http://www.unstrange.com/dsm1.html

In DSM-III (1980) Kanner’s definition ‘Pervasive lack of responsiveness to other people (autism)’ was required to qualify for an ‘Autism Spectrum Disorder’.

In the revised DSM-III-R (1987) Kanner’s definition was relegated to just one of five isolated symptoms in the social domain and was not required to qualify for an ASD diagnosis. A field trial comparing DSM-III to DSM-III-R criteria found that ‘autism was being overdiagnosed:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/1483972

When DSM-IV (1994) was introduced, the subsequent years produced an astounding seemingly worldwide autism pandemic with prevelance rates sky rocketing from 4 to 6 cases per 10000 to 1 per 150. DSM-IV completly removed Kanner’s definition and replaced it with the vague, ambigous and subjective:

‘Qualitative impairment in social interaction’

This has resulted in conferring an ASD diagnosis in children who would never have qualified for an ‘autism’ diagnosis using Kanner’s defnition in DSM editions prior to 1987, including mentally retarded children with ‘autistic-type’ behaviors and Romanian orphans subjected to extreme social isolation and were adopted into well-functioning English families who also meet diagnostic criteria for an ASD. We now have the same phenoma of what Kanner described in 1965:

“Almost overnight, the country seemed to be populated by a multitude of autistic children”

What would Kanner have called the APA’s committee on Autism and the PDD’s who were responsible for the diagnostic criteria published in DSM-IV in 1994? More than likely he would have described the framers of DSM-IV as ‘acrobatic jumpers who go in for the summary adoption of diagnostic cliches and have found a new bandwagon, ‘Autism Spectrum Disorders”. Had the framers of DSM-IV used a more accurate and descriptive label such as neurodevelopmental disorder spectrum and reserved Kanner’s definition for the small subgroup who actually met diagnostic criteria for Kanner’s definition, the entire myth of a global autism pandemic could have been avoided.

See http://neurodiversity.com/weblog/article/163/

See http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2008/06/the_nuttiness_that_is_whaleto.php

See also http://www.immunizationinfo.org/,
especially http://www.immunizationinfo.org/iom_reports_detail.cfv?id=42.

And if you have the time, read the three-part series that ends with
http://mainstreamparenting.wordpress.com/2008/06/07/thimerosal-and-autism-an-overview-part-iii/

Schools did not used to have services for autistic children; now they do. To get services, children would have received them (if they did) under other labels.

Schools did not offer as many services before Section 504 of the ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act) was passed in 1973. So naturally, parents did not ask for services that did not exist! There are a lot of bureaucrats who will assume that, “if people aren’t asking, then there is no need”.

Schools were formerly not required to track how many autistic children they served with special services; now they do. We all know that no one is going to keep track of information unless they have to! Lack of records does not indicate lack of autistic children — it just means lack of records.

“Absence of data is not the same thing as data of absence.”

Thank you so kindly for posting the new study!

andrea

Key realities about autism, vaccines, vaccine-injury compensation, Thimerosal, and autism-related research