Prevalence of sensory impairments, physical and intellectual disabilities, and mental health in children and young people with self/proxy-reported autism: Observational study of a whole country population.
Autism almost always brings extra medical, sensory, or mental health conditions—assess for all of them at intake and every year after.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Rydzewska et al. (2019) looked at every child and young adult with autism in one country. Ages ranged from birth to 24 years.
They counted how many of these youth also had sensory loss, physical disabilities, intellectual disability, or mental health diagnoses.
The team used census-style records, so no one was left out.
What they found
Autism rarely travels alone. Most youth carried at least one extra condition.
Sensory impairments, cerebral palsy, epilepsy, ADHD, anxiety, and mood disorders all showed up far more often than in the general population.
How this fits with other research
Pan et al. (2021) pooled earlier studies and found the same pattern: autism plus epilepsy, cerebral palsy, and macrocephaly is common. Their meta-analysis adds weight to the new census numbers.
Etyemez et al. (2022) dug deeper. They showed kids who have both autism and intellectual disability rack up more neurological diagnoses, while kids without ID collect more psychiatric ones. Ewelina’s snapshot did not split the groups this way, so Semra sharpens the picture.
Supekar et al. (2017) tracked the same age range and found that epilepsy and ADHD rates fall after adolescence, but schizophrenia risk rises in older males. Ewelina’s cross-sectional map is a single time slice; Kaustubh warns us that the mix of conditions keeps changing as clients age.
Why it matters
You can’t write one assessment plan for “autism.” You need to screen each client for the whole cluster: hearing or vision issues, seizure history, motor problems, mood symptoms, and trauma. Update the screen yearly, because the profile shifts with age. Build your behavior plans around the extra needs, not just the autism label.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
This study investigated the comorbid conditions in a whole country population of children/young people aged 0-24 years with and without autism. Data were drawn from Scotland's Census 2011. We calculated the percentage with autism, their extent of comorbid conditions, odds ratio (with 95% confidence intervals) of autism predicting comorbidities, adjusted for age and gender, and odds ratio for age and gender predicting comorbidities within the cohort with autism. A total of 25,063/1,548,819 (1.6%) had autism: 19,880 (79.3%) males and 5183 (20.7%) females. Autism had an odds ratio of 5.4 (5.1-5.6) for predicting deafness/partial hearing loss, odds ratio of 8.9 (8.1-9.7) for blindness/partial sight loss, odds ratio of 49.7 (38.1-64.9) for intellectual disabilities, odds ratio of 15.7 (13.4-18.5) for mental health conditions, odds ratio of 15.8 (14.1-17.8) for physical disability and odds ratio of 3.9 (3.8-4.0) for other conditions. Females with autism were more likely to have each additional condition than males, including intellectual disabilities, suggesting they may have more severe autism than males and adding evidence that autism may be currently underdiagnosed in more intellectually able females. These conditions are disabling and have a significant impact on long-term quality of life; their coexistence with autism adds extra complexity. It is important to raise clinicians' awareness of this extent of comorbidity, and to have accurate prevalence data to plan prevention and intervention measures, and to follow health inequality trends.
Autism : the international journal of research and practice, 2019 · doi:10.1177/1362361318791279