Commonly studied comorbid psychopathologies among persons with autism spectrum disorder.

The authors read every paper they could find on other diagnoses that travel with autism. They did not run new kids or new tests. They simply mapped what the field has studied most.

They found most papers look at anxiety, depression, and ADHD in children who speak and test in the normal IQ range. Very few papers look at kids or adults who also have intellectual disability.

The map shows a big blank spot. We know a lot about higher-functioning children with autism who feel anxious or can’t sit still. We know almost nothing about people with both autism and ID.

Adults are missing too. Most studies stop at age eighteen, so we have little data on grown-ups with any IQ level.

Bowen et al. (2012) and Badia et al. (2013) fit the same pattern: they studied kids without ID and found lots of anxiety and ADHD. These papers are bricks in the wall the review describes.

McCarthy et al. (2010) and Hilton et al. (2010) did the opposite: they looked only at people with autism plus ID. They found high rates of other disorders, but few teams copied their work. The review shows this gap is still wide open.

Hanson et al. (2013) seems to clash: single parents said 16% of kids with autism also had ADHD, but when teachers agreed the number dropped to 2%. The review explains why numbers jump around: different methods, different informants, and no gold rule on how to count overlap.

If you assess a child with autism and normal IQ, you have plenty of checklists for anxiety, depression, and ADHD. If the same child also has ID, or if the client is thirty years old, you are flying blind. Start screening anyway: use the same tools, note the gaps, and share the data. The field needs your cases to fill the blank spots on the map.