Ebony Holliday, PhD, assistant director of Community Programs at Kennedy Krieger Institute’s Center for Autism Services, Science and Innovation (CASSI), talks about the factors that can contribute to children of color going undiagnosed or diagnosed and supported later for autism than white children and how better outreach and intervention can help shift those trends.
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Transcript
There are multiple factors that can contribute to children of color, black children, Latinx children being diagnosed at times later than other children. Sometimes those are cultural factors, and it may be things like stigma that are present into the community. There may be other things like access, so being able to access resources in the community. It can be looking at quality assessment and quality evaluations and screening. So those are all things that can contribute at times to later diagnosis. I will note with current prevalence rates, we are seeing improvements in that for children of color. So definitely the last prevalence rates that came out from the CDC, we definitely saw some increases and actually higher rates of diagnosis for children of color. And that was really for the first time that they found that in the surveillance types of data that they have. So that is information that we did have to look at, and we are seeing that better interventions, better outreach to communities of color, those types of things can really impact diagnosis rates that we’re seeing.
So there definitely has been a steady increase over the past years and even decades in prevalence rates of autism. So if we look at many or any graphs, we see that there’s really a steady line that goes up with that. And often there are questions on where is that coming from, is that a true increase? Is that related to other things? And there may be multiple factors at play. One of the things that I’ll mention is better screening that we’re doing and better identification early on. And so there really was a movement and a push, kind of a public health approach to really making sure that we are looking for signs that we are doing surveillance and screening for autism at early pediatrician appointments, at specific ages for young children. And so that has been things that have been widespread. There are a lot of public health campaigns that have been done to bring it to the awareness of families. There are easy to use tools now. There are apps where you can monitor your child’s development. So I feel like there are a lot of resources out there in the community and it’s easier to get the word out. So people are doing a better job, I think, at recognizing these signs and symptoms and making sure that appropriate referrals are made early and so we can get individuals into treatment, into service.