The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) latest Autism and Developmental Disabilities Monitoring (ADDM) Network survey found that 1 in 31 children has autism.
The survey, published in the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, estimated the prevalence of autism in children between 4 and 8 years old during 2022. “Among children aged 8 years in 2022, ASD prevalence was 32.2 per 1,000 children (one in 31),” the report said, drawing upon data collected from sites in Arizona, Arkansas, California, Georgia, Indiana, Maryland, Minnesota, Missouri, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Puerto Rico, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, and Wisconsin.
Nearly 40% of autistic children aged 8 years were classified as having an intellectual disability.
The prevalence of autism is 4.8 times higher than when the survey was first conducted in 2002.
“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.
Kennedy called the prevalence of autism in boys “astounding,” listing it as 1 in 20 and further noting its prevalence in California as 1 in 12.5.
“President Trump has tasked me with identifying the root causes of the childhood chronic disease epidemic — including autism,” Kennedy stated. “We are assembling teams of world-class scientists to focus research on the origins of the epidemic, and we expect to begin to have answers by September.”
He added that the autism epidemic “has now reached a scale unprecedented in human history because it affects the young.”
“The risks and costs of this crisis are a thousand times more threatening to our country than COVID-19,” he said. “Autism is preventable and it is unforgivable that we have not yet identified the underlying causes. We should have had these answers 20 years ago.”
