Common Tool for Diagnosing Autism Only Identifies 1 in 5 Autistic Children

This finding challenges the goal of universal autism screening in toddlers and suggests that many autistic children are not being diagnosed.

A recent study showed that current tools to diagnose autism in the first three years of life are not capable of identifying autism in most cases. Those diagnosed early typically display more significant or obvious cognitive delays. | Photo by Jonathan Borba on Unsplash

Most autistic children do not experience cognitive delays and they develop speech at similar times as their non-autistic peers. In fact, some autistic children speak earlier than average and do not miss major developmental milestones.

The main characteristics of many autistic children include:

• intensity of focus
• overwhelmingly high emotional empathy and distress in response to others’ pain
• differences in social preferences such as wanting to hang out with one person at a time or in small groups
• sensory differences — being either very sensitive or under-responsive to touch, taste, smell, noise, and so on

These characteristics go against the stereotype that a person must have all of the “classic” traits of autism in order to be diagnosed.

Even with vast improvements in autism diagnosis over the past few decades, resulting in more and earlier diagnoses, children are still falling through the diagnostic cracks. One…