Fractures in individuals with and without a history of infantile autism. A Danish register study based on hospital discharge diagnoses.
Autistic adults break bones less often than the general public, so skip blanket fracture screening and target real fall risks instead.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Danish researchers checked hospital records for every adult who had been diagnosed with infantile autism as a child.
They matched each autistic adult with three same-age, same-sex adults from the general population.
Then they counted how many people in each group had ever had a broken bone recorded in the hospital system.
What they found
Only about one in ten autistic adults had ever fractured a bone.
In the matched control group, about one in four had a fracture history.
The difference was large enough to say autistic adults break bones less often, not just by chance.
How this fits with other research
Jackson et al. (2025) looked closer at how autistic adults (most also had intellectual disability) actually break bones. They found the breaks that do happen are usually low-energy falls during transfers or walking.
Matson et al. (2008) saw the opposite pattern in young autistic boys: their arm and leg bones were thinner than typical. Thinner bones would predict more fractures later, yet Erik et al. found fewer.
The gap makes sense when you remember L et al. studied boys on restricted diets, while Erik et al. counted all diagnosed children who grew up. Diet, activity level, and cautious behavior may balance out the thin-bone risk.
Why it matters
You can stop routinely X-raying autistic adults just because they have autism.
Instead, focus fall-prevention on the few high-risk moments A et al. flagged: transfers, uneven ground, and cluttered spaces.
If a client does fracture, treat it, but don’t assume weak bones are part of autism itself.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
We compared the prevalence and types of fractures in a clinical sample of 118 individuals diagnosed as children with infantile autism (IA) with 336 matched controls from the general population. All participants were screened through the nationwide Danish National Hospital Register. The average observation time was 30.3 years (range 27.3-30.4 years), and mean age at follow-up was 42.7 years (range 27.3-57.3 years). Of the 118 individuals with IA, 14 (11.9%) were registered with at least one fracture diagnosis against 83 (24.7%) in the comparison group (p = 0.004; OR = 0.41; 95%CI 0.22-0.76), but the nature of their fractures seems somewhat different. Epilepsy was a risk factor, but only in the comparison group. Our results lend no support to the notion that fracture is a common comorbid condition in a population of people diagnosed with IA as children.
Journal of autism and developmental disorders, 2012 · doi:10.1007/s10803-011-1286-x