Autism rates have hit a record high nationwide, according to new data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, with one in 31 children in diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder by their eighth birthday. In New Jersey, the rate is slightly higher, at about one in every 29 children.
The findings are based on analysis of medical records from 2022 and reflect a dramatic rise in autism over the past two decades, increasing 375% since monitoring began back in 2000.
“The rate of autism has increased broadly across all the groups that we look at, across all races, ethnicities, all subgroups of autism, all levels of impairment,” said Dr. Walter Zahorodny, an autism researcher and clinical psychologist at Rutgers University who has led the CDC-sponsored New Jersey Autism Study for more than 20 years.
“There has been an important demographic shift,” said Zahorodny. “From 2000 maybe through 2015, [autism] was largely over-represented among white and affluent communities. More recently in the last five to seven years, it has shifted so that now children from minority and under-served communities are more likely to have autism than their white peers. This is something unexpected and something that might be a clue about the rising rates of autism. That’ll take more research though.”
Yet the cause of autism remains unknown, and the questions have sparked new attention. U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on Wednesday declared autism an “epidemic” and said his office will shift research focus to finding the environmental factors involved.
Zahorodny spoke alongside Kennedy and echoed the sentiment in an interview afterward with NJ Spotlight News.
“It would be wonderful for us to understand what’s driving these things, but we don’t know,” he said. “I think that there will be a positive shift toward studying environmental risk factors or triggers, because there’s been an overemphasis in overfunding of the genetics-only perspective. Autism involves both genetic and environmental factors. To exclude the environmental factors for such a long time, it has stymied real progress in the area.”
But Zahorodny disputed other researchers’ assertations that autism rates are increasing due to better screening and early identification.
“I wish these experts would tell us what their evidence is. I’m strongly oriented to evidence and data, and I don’t see any data that shows that autism screening has really made a difference or that there are other factors related to the definition of autism or the awareness of autism,” he said.
