{"id":83328,"date":"2025-08-20T21:08:26","date_gmt":"2025-08-20T21:08:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/83328\/"},"modified":"2025-08-20T21:08:26","modified_gmt":"2025-08-20T21:08:26","slug":"why-are-detectable-rates-of-autism-soaring-in-the-u-s-but-holding-steady-in-other-countries-with-a-history-of-far-better-screening-its-not-vaccines-or-chemicals-but-diagnosis-infla","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/83328\/","title":{"rendered":"Why are detectable rates of autism soaring in the U.S. but holding steady in other countries with a history of far better screening? It\u2019s not vaccines or chemicals but \u2018diagnosis inflation\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Almost every week, it seems, we read news of some new epidemic \u2014 medical, psychological, social. Taken together, these alarming trends look like an enormous material shift: \u2026 But simultaneous crises may also be part of a broader story: We are simply looking harder and more expansively for malady and disorder, and as a result identifying more and more people as ailing or atypical.<\/p>\n<p>Others have called this diagnostic inflation or diagnostic creep, and it has formed a subgenre of research and writing on health for a decade or two now.<\/p>\n<p>Follow the latest news and policy debates on sustainable agriculture, biomedicine, and other \u2018disruptive\u2019 innovations. Subscribe to our newsletter.<\/p>\n<p>Perhaps the signal example is autism, whose spectacular rise in prevalence is a matter of renewed popular salience, thanks to MAHA, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and particularly Kennedy\u2019s war on vaccines. \u2026 But as the psychiatrist Allen Frances\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/archive.ph\/o\/C0ZfV\/https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2025\/06\/23\/opinion\/why-autism-rates-increased.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener nofollow\">wrote<\/a>\u00a0last month in a guest essay for Times Opinion, the stark rise has relatively little to do with environmental contamination, vaccines or even an increasing incidence of autistic symptoms themselves \u2014 and much more to do with the way diagnostic guidelines have evolved.<\/p>\n<p class=\"has-text-align-center\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2025\/07\/30\/opinion\/autism-adhd-diagnosis-creep.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener nofollow\">This is an excerpt. Read the original post here<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Almost every week, it seems, we read news of some new epidemic \u2014 medical, psychological, social. Taken together,&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":83329,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35],"tags":[64,63,137,514,515],"class_list":["post-83328","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-mental-health","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-health","tag-mental-health","tag-mentalhealth"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/83328","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=83328"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/83328\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/83329"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=83328"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=83328"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=83328"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}