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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.
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 main problem is that the available diagnostic tools are not sensitive enough to capture the many ways that autism can present.
Our Current Screening Tools Miss Subtle Presentations of Autism
A recent study published in BJPsych Open found that common ways of screening for autism at three years of age are only effective in diagnosing those with significant cognitive delay (IQ below 70).
Using data from the Norwegian Mother, Father and Child Cohort Study, the researchers found that an autism assessment tool identified only one in five autistic children. This finding suggests that toddlers with level one autism (formerly known as high functioning autism or Asperger’s syndrome) would likely not be diagnosed through the use of available screening tools at this age.
While the assessment tool had high specificity, meaning that there were very few false…
