Global prevalence of autism: A systematic review update
By Jinan Zeidan, Eric Fombonne, Julie Scorah, Alaa Ibrahim, M. Durkin, S. Saxena, A. Yusuf, A. Shih, Mayada Elsabbagh. Autism Research, 2022
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Prevalence estimates of autism are essential for informing public policy, raising awareness, and developing research priorities. Using a systematic review, we synthesized estimates of the prevalence of autism worldwide. We examined factors accounting for variability in estimates and critically reviewed evidence relevant for hypotheses about biological or social determinants (viz., biological sex, sociodemographic status, ethnicity/race, and nativity) potentially modifying prevalence estimates of autism. We performed the search in November 2021 within Medline for studies estimating autism prevalence, published since our last systematic review in 2012. Data were extracted by two independent researchers. Since 2012, 99 estimates from 71 studies were published indicating a global autism prevalence that ranges within and across regions, with a median prevalence of 100/10,000 (range: 1.09/10,000 to 436.0/10,000). The median male‐to‐female ratio was 4.2. The median percentage of autism cases with co‐occurring intellectual disability was 33.0%. Estimates varied, likely reflecting complex and dynamic interactions between patterns of community awareness, service capacity, help seeking, and sociodemographic factors. A limitation of this review is that synthesizing methodological features precludes a quality appraisal of studies. Our findings reveal an increase in measured autism prevalence globally, reflecting the combined effects of multiple factors including the increase in community awareness and public health response globally, progress in case identification and definition, and an increase in community capacity. Hypotheses linking factors that increase the likelihood of developing autism with variations in prevalence will require research with large, representative samples and comparable autism diagnostic criteria and case‐finding methods in diverse world regions over time.
Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Epidemiology, Genetics
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/101903b528b205b28295236b5a51386249f47df1
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Citations in the corpus
- The social determinants of mental health and disorder: evidence, prevention and recommendations (2024, background): “…spec trum disorder, have traditionally exhibited more dramatic sex dif ferences in their occurrence, with systematic review evidence that the prevalence of eating disorders is up to four times greater in bio logical females than males 204 , a ratio reversed for autism spectrum disorder 205 .”
- Oscillatory activity underlying cognitive performance in children and adolescents with autism: a systematic review (2024, background): “There is broad agreement that the men: women gender ratio in ASD is approximately 4:1 (Oberman et al., 2005; Roman-Urrestarazu and Van Kessel, 2022; Zeidan et al., 2022; Zhao et al., 2022).”
- Globally elevated excitation–inhibition ratio in children with autism spectrum disorder and below-average intelligence (2021, background): “Therefore, here we focused on boys, who are about 4 times more likely to be diagnosed with ASD than girls [36].”