ST. LOUIS — A new Saint Louis University study of nearly a decade of health records finds that the recent rise in autism spectrum disorder (ASD) diagnoses is being driven largely by girls and women, who are being identified at significantly higher rates than in years past, often years later than boys and men.
The JAMA Network study, led by Erick Messias, M.D., Ph.D., chair and professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Neuroscience at Saint Louis University School of Medicine and a SLUCare physician at SSM Health, analyzed electronic health records for 171,134 patients across a large Midwestern healthcare system from 2016 to 2024. It is among the first to track sex-specific autism diagnosis trends across childhood, adolescence and adulthood within the same health system, before and after the COVID-19 pandemic.
Key takeaways include:
- These findings suggest that the reported increases in first autism spectrum disorder diagnoses post COVID-19 pandemic are due to increased recognition of females with autism spectrum disorder rather than a uniform population level increase.
- While new autism diagnoses among males held steady or declined from 2016 to 2024, new diagnoses among females rose sharply after 2020.
- The pattern held across every age group studied: children, adolescents and adults.
- Girls and women received an autism diagnosis an average of 3.4 years later than boys and men (age 15.7 vs. 12.3).
- Diagnoses of Asperger disorder, a category eliminated from diagnostic manuals in 2013, continued to fade from medical records as clinicians shifted to the broader autism spectrum disorder classification.
