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Tuesday, April 11, 2023

Diagnosing Girls


Azeen Ghorayshi at NYT:
In 2012, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimated that boys were 4.7 times as likely as girls to receive an autism diagnosis. By 2018, the ratio had dipped to 4.2 to 1. And in data released by the agency last month, the figure was 3.8 to 1. In that new analysis, based on the health and education records of more than 226,000 8-year-olds across the country, the autism rate in girls surpassed 1 percent, the highest ever recorded.

More adult women like Dr. [Morénike Giwa] Onaiwu are being diagnosed as well, raising questions about how many young girls continue to be missed or misdiagnosed.
...In a 2017 review of dozens of studies, researchers from Britain estimated that the true sex ratio was closer to 3 to 1. Some online surveys that include people who have self-diagnosed show an even lower skew of males to females.