Almost one-third less people will be diagnosed with autism based on the new autism guidelines issued by the American Psychiatric Association (APA), according to new research.
The revised definition was released May 2013 and is the first time in 20 years that such a drastic change has been made to psychiatric diagnosis criteria. Researchers of this study note that children lacking a diagnosis for autism spectrum disorder (ASD) will be left without social services, medical benefits and educational support.
"We are potentially going to lose diagnosis and treatment for some of the most vulnerable kids who have developmental delays," Kristine M. Kulage, director of the Office of Scholarship and Research Development at Columbia Nursing, said in a news release. The study's team analyzed the effect of changes to the classification tool for psychiatric conditions, called the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM).
The previous guidelines, called DSM-IV-TR, had a broad definition of autism that included the subgroups autistic disorder, Asperger's disorder and pervasive development disorder - not otherwise specified. In the newest criteria, named DSM-5, these subgroups are not included. Nevertheless, it is still designed to diagnose those who would have fallen into one of the three previous categories. What's more, a new category, called social communication disorder, was also added to include individuals with verbal and nonverbal communication impairments but without other autism characteristics.
The study found a 31 percent decrease in ASD diagnosis using the new manual, DSM-5, compared with the number of cases that would have been identified under the previous version of the manual, DSM-IV-TR.
These diagnoses are important because, according to the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention, about 1 in 88 children in the United States have ASD. ASD symptoms fall on a continuum, where some are more severe than others, and early diagnosis and treatment are shown to have better outcomes in those individuals.
