Trump claimed autism rates are rising. Here are the facts

Yahoo

08-03-2025

1 in 36 eight-year-old children in the U.S. were identified as having an Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) diagnosis in 2020, according to the CDC. The prevalence of diagnoses has increased in recent decades, both in the U.S. and abroad.
Reasons for this rise include increased awareness, changes to how professionals diagnose and identify ASD, and increased community capacity, meaning the development of services in the community that might identify and support people with an ASD diagnosis.
According to the CDC, studies show that "vaccines are not associated with ASD." There is also no single cause of ASD.
Speaking to a joint session of Congress on March 4, 2025, U.S. President Donald Trump repeated a claim that autism rates among children are rising and that his pick to lead the nation's top health agency — Robert F. Kennedy Jr., or "Bobby" — was positioned to "figure out what is going on." Trump said:
As an example, not long ago — and you can't even believe these numbers — one in 10,000 children had autism. One in 10,000, and now it's one in 36. There's something wrong. One in 36. Think of that. So, we're going to find out what it is, and there's nobody better than Bobby and all of the people that are working with you. You have the best to figure out what is going on.
It was not the first time Trump made the claim about autism rates and praised Kennedy, who has long promoted the debunked notion that vaccines cause autism, as being a solution to the alleged trend. Kennedy was sworn in as the leader of the Department of Health and Human Services on Feb. 13, 2025.
Trump's claim that autism diagnoses have increased is supported by research that shows a rise in autism prevalence (now called autism spectrum disorder, or ASD) in recent decades, both in the U.S. and globally. Prevalence in this case means the proportion of people in the population who have an ASD diagnosis at any given time.
However, the past figures Trump cited were lower than what research suggests.
On a page titled "Frequently Asked Questions about Autism Spectrum Disorder," the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention wrote that "the prevalence of ASD among 8-year-olds has increased most years since CDC began tracking ASD in 2000."
Autism has been part of the autism spectrum disorder group of diagnoses in "The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition" (DSM-5) since 2019. The DSM-5 is a taxonomic and diagnostic tool published by the American Psychiatric Association.
In terms of the other numbers given, Trump's "one in 36" figure likely stems from CDC figures in 2023 that looked at autism prevalence in 8-year-old children from select states who were part of the CDC's Autism and Developmental Disabilities Monitoring Network.
Separate data from the CDC's "Autism Prevalence Studies Data Table" shows that in the U.S. from 1992 to 1994 — approximately 30 years ago — autism prevalence, measured through parent reports, was 38 in 100,000 children under the age of 18 nationally — higher than Trump's December 2024 estimates. In other words, the research shows that autism rates have increased since the early 1990s, but not as much as Trump claimed.
Autism researchers point to various reasons to explain the increase in the prevalence of autism in the past few decades.
In a 2022 paper published in Autism Research, a journal published by the International Society for Autism Research, which promotes research into the disorder, researchers found: "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."
In an example of how increased community awareness could lead to a rise in diagnoses, researchers from Incite, a social science research institute at Columbia University, found in 2010 that children living near other children who received an autism diagnosis were more likely to receive one of their own.
According to the study's authors, this was due to interaction between parents and the resulting increase in awareness of the signs of autism in children.
Another factor that may have resulted in higher reports of ASD diagnoses was the design of surveys used to measure how many people had been diagnosed with the disorder. Researchers studying the 2014 National Health Interview Survey, a national survey that monitors the health of the U.S. population, found that in this particular survey, a change in methodology resulted in a rise in reported ASD diagnoses.
After surveyors switched the order of questions about ASD and developmental delays to asking about ASD first, ASD diagnoses were found to be higher than expected. Researchers concluded it was likely that, previously, "parents of children diagnosed with ASD reported this developmental disability as other DD [developmental disability] instead of, or in addition to, ASD."
Community capacity, or the ability of a community to detect and diagnose ASD in children, was also credited by researchers as a reason for the increased rise in diagnoses. Examples of this included initiatives such as the CDC's "Learn the Signs. Act Early" program, which helps parents or child care professionals react early if a child is not meeting developmental milestones.
The American Academy of Pediatrics now also recommends that children be screened for ASD at 18 and 24 months. Recommendations like these might help initiate ASD assessments that wouldn't have happened before.
The CDC's research shows that children are becoming more and more likely to be diagnosed early — in 2020, for example, researchers found that children who were 4 that year (that is, children born in 2016) were 1.6 times as likely to have been diagnosed with ASD as children who were 8 (those born in 2012).
Aside from societal and scientific changes to how professionals diagnose and track ASD, researchers also believe that an advanced parental age for both mothers and fathers may play a role in how likely a child is to be diagnosed with ASD.
A study of more than 5 million children from Denmark, Israel, Norway, Sweden and Western Australia found, among other results, that the older the parents were, the higher the "relative risk" of having a child with an ASD diagnosis.
Birth data from the U.S. showed that the average age of a first-time mother in 2022 was 27.4 years, up from 27.3 years in 2021. According to a report on the data published by the National Center for Health Statistics, which is part of the CDC, that data represented a "record high for the nation" in terms of maternal age at first childbirth.
According to the CDC, "studies continue to show that vaccines are not associated with ASD." On an informational page about the disorder, the CDC also noted that scientists do not believe there is a single cause of ASD, which instead appears to be the result of multiple different factors.
Snopes has previously written about autism, including whether Amish people are diagnosed with the disorder and how misleading research claimed to show links between autism and vaccines.
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