New CDC autism prevalence rate at 1 in 59 children

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimates autism prevalence at 1 in 59 children based on data from the CDC’s Autism and Developmental Disabilities Monitoring (ADDM) Network – a tracking system that provides estimates of the prevalence and characteristics of autism spectrum disorder among more than 300,000 8-year-old children. The ADDM Network estimates are combined from 11 communities within Arizona, Arkansas, Colorado, Georgia, Maryland, Minnesota, Missouri, New Jersey, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Wisconsin. The 11 communities surveyed in this report represent about 8 percent of 8-year-old children in the United States.

You can read more in the official CDC press release on ASF’s website here. You can read the official CDC analysis in a report published today in the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR) Surveillance Summary.

The Autism Science Foundation team is proud to announce that ASF Board Member Dr. Paul Offit of the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia received the Albert B. Sabin Gold Medal from the Sabin Vaccine Institute. Every year, the Sabin Vaccine Institute recognizes a distinguished member of the public health community who has made extraordinary contributions in vaccinology or a complementary field. The Sabin Gold Medal commemorates the legacy of Dr. Albert B. Sabin, the developer of the oral polio vaccine that has helped bring poliovirus to the brink of eradication. The Sabin Vaccine Institute honored Dr. Offit for his contributions as co-inventor of an oral rotavirus vaccine and his leadership as one of the United States’ most vocal and dedicated advocates for immunization.

You can read more about Dr. Offit’s award here.

This week’s podcast covers the recent article published in Molecular Autism that looks into the history of Hans Asperger, the eponym of Asperger’s Syndrome and a physician with ties to eugenics in Nazi-era Vienna.

This week’s podcast is a mini-recap of the 5th Annual Day of learning. Hear what the speakers distilled in their TED-style talks on topics covered sleep, diet, and medical marijuana as a potential treatment for autism. Plus hear about the most recent ASF grantees.

Inside Philanthropy, a group that urges transparency in philanthropy and tracks philanthropic trends, recognized the uniqueness of the Autism Science Foundation’s undergraduate grants in a recent article. ASF invests in the future by funding young scientists, helping set their careers in autism research in motion, early on. Learn more about what ASF funds here.

On this week’s podcast, studies tracking changes over time. The British Autism Study of Infant Siblings (BASIS) tracked changes in adaptive behaviors and cognitive skills in children at low-risk and high-risk of an ASD diagnosis, based on family history. The results point to the value in monitoring siblings of those with autism. Researchers at Kaiser Permanente tried to measure the prevalence of psychiatric and medical conditions in adolescents and young adults with ASD by studying its members in Northern California. Based on their results, the researchers call for all clinicians to approach ASD as a chronic health condition requiring regular follow-up and routine screening and treatment of medical and psychiatric issues.

The goal of the Autism Sisters Project is to build a large genetic database that researchers can use to explore the sex difference in autism diagnoses between boys and girls and discover how the potential protective factor, known as the female protective effect, can be harnessed to help people with autism of both sexes. NBC New York spoke with the Mullers, a family participating in the study, as well as with ASF Chief Science Officer Dr. Alycia Halladay and the Seaver Autism Center team at Mount Sinai in New York. You can watch the news clip here.

On this week’s ASF podcast: By looking directly at the brains of people with autism, researchers at UC Davis MIND Institute, led by Dr. Thomas Avino and Dr. Cyndi Schumann, show a disruption of neuron number in the amygdala in autism. The amygdala is important because it is linked to emotion, fear and anxiety in people with autism. The shift in too many vs. too few neurons that occurs in adolescence may help explain anxiety in people with ASD. Read the full open-access article here.

On this week’s podcast, highlights of a new study led by Dr. Amy Kalkbrenner of the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee published in Environmental Health Perspectives—certain air pollutants from cars and coal burning plants were associated with autism risk and severity. This scientific evidence supports policies which keep U.S. Environmental Protection Agency infrastructure intact to monitor air quality.

Researchers at Autism BrainNet node UC Davis MIND Institute found that while typically-developing children gain more neurons in a region of the brain that governs social and emotional behavior, the amygdala, as they become adults, people with ASD do not. The open access research published in PNAS studied 52 postmortem human brains, both neurotypical and ASD, ranging from 2 to 48 years of age. There were more neurons in young children with ASD, but as they got older, those numbers went down. The press release on this article can be read here.

The Moyer family was recently featured in the Sag Harbor Express for their participation in the Autism Sisters Project. The advances made through this research would not be possible without the contribution of families like theirs. Read about them here.

On this week’s ASF podcast, regression—what is it and who can see it? Using the right tools, both parents and clinicians can see that many more children with autism than thought show regression, a gradual decline or loss of skills starting at around 12 months of age and showing continual declines until 36 months of age. In 2016, a National Institutes of Health (NIH) committee concluded that regression is due to biological events that disrupt the formation of specific brain circuits at critical times in development.