Oct. 11, 2023 – More than one-third of young children diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder have outgrown the disorder by the time they are about 6 years old, according to a new study by researchers at Boston Children’s Hospital.
The results were published this month in JAMA Pediatrics. The study was of 213 children who had an autism spectrum disorder (ASD) diagnosis when they were between 1 and 3 years old. On average, the children were diagnosed at about 2½ years old, and 83% of the children in the study were boys.
Diagnosis-based interventions were provided to all children in the study. Applied behavior analysis, a therapy that focuses on increasing helpful behaviors and decreasing unhelpful behaviors, was the most common intervention used. Applied behavior analysis can teach people to improve skills in areas such as communication, attention, concentration, and socialization.
The children in the study were re-evaluated for ASD between the ages of 5 and 7. The evaluations took place between 2018 and 2022.
By the time the children were about 6 years old, 37% of them no longer met the criteria for ASD. The 79 children in the study who outgrew ASD were more likely to be girls or to have what the researchers called “higher baseline adaptive functioning,” compared with those who didn’t outgrow the disorder. The term “baseline adaptive functioning” refers to basic everyday skills such as communication, self-care and decision-making.
“It is possible that children who no longer have autism at age 6 may have responded better to treatment than children whose autism persisted,” study co-author William Barbaresi, MD, chief of developmental medicine at Boston Children’s Hospital, said in a statement. “The results of the study should prompt a very frank reconsideration of the need for much more research to understand whether current treatments for autism are working or whether major new efforts are needed to develop treatment approaches.”