In the largest study of its kind, a Swedish group has
determined that actual autism rates probably have not changed in recent years,
even though diagnoses of autism cases continue to climb.
The research, led by Sebastian Lundstrom and colleagues at
the University of Gothenburg, found that about 1 percent of those in an ongoing
study of twins met the criteria for having autism, even though the number of
officially diagnosed autism cases in the country’s national health registry had
climbed steadily over a 10-year period. The power of the study, published last
month in the British Medical Journal, comes from the fact that Sweden has
comprehensive health records for its population, and the research covered
nearly 20,000 twins whose families were asked about their symptoms, along with
diagnostic records for more than a million children born between 1993 and 2002.
Because the study counted autism diagnoses of children up
to age 10, it covered a period up until about 2012.
In a recent telephone interview, Lundstrom said there is no
reason to believe the Swedish experience with autism is much different from
that in the U.S. or other nations, and he said there is no evidence to suggest
that twins have a different rate of autism than the general population.
The national registry in Sweden includes all the official
diagnoses for autism spectrum disorder, which more than doubled from 0.23
percent in 1993 to 0.5 percent in 2002. That rate is lower than the 1 percent
prevalence found among the twins, but that may be because the national registry
uses a conservative definition of the disorder. In another Swedish study last
year that looked at all diagnoses for autism among teens living in Stockholm
County, the autism diagnosis rate was about 2.5 percent.
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