In the last 25 years, there has been a steady increase in the number of learners with ASD diagnoses (0.8% of all students and 6.5 % of all students with disabilities in 2010), with a 400% increase from 2000-2010, causing many to use with the word "epidemic" to describe this increase. Explain three possible reasons for this increase

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

Answer: Answers will vary but might include any of the following:
• Definition of Asperger's syndrome in the DSM-IV-TR and the ICD in the early 1990s provided new diagnostic options that were then used to categorize more learners.
• Similar to the period from 1975-1990 when the creation of learning disability category resulted in rapid increase in identifications, the creation of the autism category in IDEA 1990 may have spurred identification of previously unidentified learners.
• Recent awareness of the existence of milder manifestations of milder autism spectrum disorder has likely added some new identifications to the child count.
• With the addition of an explicit category for autism to the IDEA in 1990, students with milder ASD who might have been identified with learning disabilities previously might have then become re-identified as learners with autism.
• It is also likely that the addition of autism as an IDEA category in 1990 provided an alternative to intellectual disability for students with more severe cognitive impairments.
• Some subtle shifts among the milder judgmental categories (learning disabilities, intellectual disability, ADHD, emotional or behavioral disorders, speech impairments) may be occurring, increasing autism identification and reducing the other counts.
• Recent environmental causes may be leading to an increase in incidence of ASD, although it is important to note that there has been no evidence of such a cause to date; parenting problems and childhood vaccines have been largely ruled out as causes, and no other environmental causes have yet been identified or confirmed.