New Estimate of Autism Prevalence from the CDC

The CDC issued a new report presenting surveillance data from the ADDM network. The data, which was also published in this article, puts the rate of autism among 8-year-old US children born in 1998 at 0.9%. This is a significant increase over the previous report from the ADDM network, which looked at children born in 1992 and 1994. At sites which collected data both in 2002 (for children born 1994) and in 2006 (for children born 1998) there was a 57% increase in prevalence during this period.