Word: grinker
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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What's significant is that the study lines up well with other, more rigorous studies finding a 1% rate of autism. "It provides what scientists call convergent validity: no matter how you shake the bushes, you come up with this 1%," says Richard Roy Grinker, an autism researcher at George Washington University who has worked to determine ASD prevalence in South Korea...
...limitation of the study is its relatively small size, says Brugha. Being the first of its kind, it also needs to be confirmed by other studies. Another issue, notes Richard Roy Grinker, an autism researcher and professor of anthropology at George Washington University, who was not involved in the work, is that the study looked only at adults in the general population. Had it included people living in institutions, which is where the most severely autistic adults are likely to be, the estimated rate of ASD may have been even higher than...
...Grinker, who has a teenage daughter with autism, finds the study to be in some ways comforting. "I would think that a study like this would encourage people that children with autism could grow up and have futures that are meaningful and that they are not going to end up in institutions...
...Grinker's answer is that autistic adults are out there but wearing other labels. "Where are all the adults with fetal alcohol syndrome?" he asks. No one over 40 has the condition, thought to affect up to 1 in 500 kids today, because it was not recognized until the mid-'70s. "But no one would say alcoholism among pregnant women just started," says Grinker...
...Grinker, whose 15-year-old daughter is autistic, concedes that there's something reassuring about the idea of an epidemic: "Thinking about any disorder as an epidemic is easier than thinking about it in terms of multiple causes, shifting definitions and a scientific reality we are only just beginning to understand." Besides, if a disease suddenly spikes, it seems more plausible that the increase could be reversed--if only we could find the mysterious environmental trigger. With autism, though, that hopeful scenario seems just too simple...