Low life expectancy for Autistic people in the USA

One medical study in the USA found life expectancy for an Autistic person is 36 years.

https://www.vox.com/first-person/2018/2/19/17017976/autism-average-age-death-36-stre

Parents
  • This in-depth report linked in the article is well worth a skim-read and focuses more on research conducted in the UK. I'd avoid it if you're feeling low, though.

    I'm glad there are such studies that highlight how intensely challenging and debilitating it often is to be autistic. I still feel like there's a very long way to go before this is seen as a crisis though, which it really should be.

Reply
  • This in-depth report linked in the article is well worth a skim-read and focuses more on research conducted in the UK. I'd avoid it if you're feeling low, though.

    I'm glad there are such studies that highlight how intensely challenging and debilitating it often is to be autistic. I still feel like there's a very long way to go before this is seen as a crisis though, which it really should be.

Children
  • The writer linked to a few different interesting sources. One of them is about autistic people in the UK, but the average age of 36 came from a study based on USA data (National Vital Statistics System). The USA data doesn't show much more information about different autism diagnoses, or other commonly connected diagnoses and admitted their data is limited to only the information on a death certificate (could be other contributing factors that led up to that). So it's quite limited, but still shocking. The UK analysis is useful in that it shows that those with learning disabilities and/or epilepsy are worse off (in the stats) than those without. :(