One out of 31 children — more than 3% of kids — have been identified with autism, according to the latest results published Tuesday from a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study that tracks trends of autism’s prevalence across some communities in the U.S.
“They’ve again gone up dramatically, just in two years. We have in some states as low as 1 out of 20 boys having autism, 1 out of 31 kids. And when I was, in my generation today, the rate of autism was 1 in 10,000,” Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said Tuesday in Indiana, announcing the new findings. “And this is just one disease. This whole generation of kids is damaged by chronic disease.”
Kennedy often cites the CDC’s figures from this study as evidence for his claim that the U.S. is now seeing a growing “epidemic” of autism, which experts and advocacy groups have criticized as stigmatizing and misleading.
“As the report indicates, more children have access to evaluations for autism and more children are being identified as autistic. This is encouraging because when children are identified early, appropriate supports and services can be tailored to help them, and their families thrive,” said Dr. Kristin Sohl, of the American Academy of Pediatrics subcommittee on autism, in a statement shared before Kennedy’s remarks and the report’s release.
Dr. Céline Gounder, CBS News medical contributor and editor-at-large for public health at KFF Health News, told “CBS Mornings Plus” that the definition of what autism is has also expanded.
“It’s a spectrum. It’s not just one thing. … So that’s part of it,” she said. “We also are being much more aggressive about looking for it — pediatricians, educators.”
The definitions used in this study are also quite broad, Gounder added.
“They were looking at both health records, educational records, did a student access special ed supports, that sort of thing,” she said. “So part of it is the way in which we’re looking for it. But there also does seem to be an underlying increase that has been occurring over time.”
For years, CDC scientists have said that the data indicating a rise in diagnoses of autism spectrum disorder, or ASD, could be reflecting improved screening and access to autism services in some communities. However, the agency’s experts were not made available for a press briefing about the latest findings, marking a change from previous years.
“Research has not demonstrated that living in certain communities puts children at greater risk for developing ASD,” the CDC’s authors said in their report.
The study’s authors said estimated autism prevalence was consistently higher among Asian, Black and Hispanic children compared to White children. Factors like disparities in preterm birth and lead poisoning could be contributing to this gap, the report says.
Data from sites in 16 communities were collected for the new CDC report. The last report found a rate of 1 in 36 children through 2020, based on data from 11 communities.
While the network’s data is not nationally representative, figures from other federally-funded surveys and studies have also tracked a rise in autism’s prevalence over the past two decades, accelerating in the early 2000s.
“Autistic children add value to our communities. Advocating for resources and funding to support autistic people across the lifespan is essential for a productive and healthy America,” Sohl said in the statement.
It comes as federal spending into autism research has also surged, largely going into efforts to study the biology suspected to underlie the condition. While scientists have linked up to 90% of autism to genetic traits, other factors are also suspected to play a role in changing its risk.
Kennedy has said he believes “an environmental toxin” is causing autism, pointing to a range of potential culprits from food contaminants to vaccines.
Many studies have debunked the claim that vaccines cause autism. But there is less research for some other factors that studies suggest might be linked to autism, ranging from pesticides to time between pregnancies.
“While the number of studies investigating the epidemiology of autism is increasing, most potential environmental factors have not been investigated sufficiently to draw firm conclusions,” the federal government’s autism research coordination office said in 2023.
In a statement Tuesday, Kennedy claimed that autism was preventable and said that it was “unforgivable that we have not yet identified the underlying causes.”
“We are assembling teams of world-class scientists to focus research on the origins of the epidemic, and we expect to begin to have answers by September,” he said. Leading autism organizations have expressed skepticism over that promise and concern that he will revive debunked theories.
Finding an answer to the cause or causes of autism by September is “not realistic,” Gounder said.
“Some of the theories include diabetes during pregnancy that might be affecting the development of the child, air pollution, exposure to micro plastics, antibiotic use and the way that changes the microbiome and the gut,” she said. “There’s a whole bunch of different theories. And again, because it’s so many different diseases actually labeled Autism Spectrum Disorder, it’s going to take a while to really tease that out.”
The CDC also released a statement noting that prevalence varied widely between different sites in the study. That variation “could reflect differences in availability of services for early detection, evaluation, and diagnostic practices,” Dr. Karyl Rattay, head of the CDC’s Division of Human Development and Disability, said.
CDC delayed report, barred agency experts from media
The CDC’s National Center on Birth Defects and Developmental Disabilities was initially planning to release the report in March this year, multiple officials told CBS News. Its publication was pushed back by CDC officials amid a department-wide pause on communications ordered by the Trump administration.
Plans to make the agency’s experts available to explain and interpret the results were also scrapped, said multiple CDC officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. Ahead of the agency’s last release of autism figures in 2023, CDC scientists appeared at press briefings and interviews with media outlets about the report.
That year, news outlets were also provided with embargoed copies of the report ahead of time to give journalists time to prepare their reports and interview experts. This longstanding practice has also now been abandoned agency-wide under the Trump administration, officials said, both for the autism report and many other studies published by the agency.
The CDC and HHS did not respond to requests for the embargoed report, or to make any experts available for an interview.
Most of the communications staff working with the center have also been laid off, officials said, as part of Kennedy’s sweeping restructuring of the department this month.
The branch responsible for producing the autism figures is one of the few teams remaining on the job in the CDC’s birth defects and disabilities center.
Officials expect it to be cleaved off from the CDC and merged into Kennedy’s new Administration for a Healthy America agency.
