Emergency Department Utilization of Adolescents and Young Adults with Autism Spectrum Disorder.

Iannuzzi et al. (2022) tracked emergency room visits for autistic teens and young adults. They compared these visits to same-age peers without autism.

The team looked at whether the visit was for something preventable, like an asthma flare or infected pressure sore. They also counted how many visits turned into hospital stays.

Autistic youth landed in the ER more often for problems that a primary-care visit could have caught. Once there, they were admitted almost four times as often as their non-autistic peers.

The pattern held across both public and private insurance, so extra ER use was not just a poverty issue.

Goris et al. (2021) saw the same flood of autistic youth into ERs, but they stopped at counting visits. Dorothea zooms in and shows the visits are often preventable and more likely to end in a hospital bed.

Stofleth et al. (2022) reviewed 16 studies and found autistic adults also lean on emergency services. The new teen data extend that story downward, hinting the habit starts before adulthood.

Amaral et al. (2019) focused only on psychiatric ER trips in privately insured teens. Dorothea widens the lens to any preventable cause and still finds a spike, proving the problem is bigger than mental-health crises alone.

If you serve autistic teens or young adults, schedule and script primary-care checkups before small issues explode. Teach caregivers red flags that warrant an urgent call to the nurse line instead of a 2 a.m. ER run. Your behavior plan can include a ‘medical home’ goal and coping rehearsals for routine clinic visits. Fewer preventable admissions means more hours for learning, working, and living in the community.