Northern Ireland: 5.9% of school-aged children with autism in 2025

It's here... The prevalence of autism (including Asperger’s Syndrome) in school age children in Northern Ireland 2025 https://www.health-ni.gov.uk/sites/default/files/2025-05/asd-children-ni-2025.pdf

In 2023 the estimated prevalence rate for school-aged children was 5%. They missed 2024 but now in 2025 the rate is 5.9%. Read that back to yourself: 5.9%

And for boys... well, in 2023 the rate was 7.3% of school-aged boys with autism. In 2025, it's 8.3% of boys with autism. Again, read once more: 8.3% of boys.

No doubt there will be some who talk about 'better awareness' or 'expanding diagnostic criteria' as the cause(s) of the increase. The current iteration of the DSM diagnostic manual (DSM-5) came into being in 2013. The current iteration of the ICD diagnostic manual (ICD-11) came into being in 2018. Ask yourself: is it really so difficult to think that there may be a real increase in both autistic behaviours and autism diagnoses? Y'know, could part of the increase in autism be real? I believe the data suggest yes, it is part real. And probably quite a lot part real too.

"Majority in UK now ‘self-identify’ as neurodivergent"... read that back to yourself a few times.

"Majority in UK now ‘self-identify’ as neurodivergent" https://www.thetimes.com/uk/science/article/self-diagnose-neurodivergent-99l9kl8v5

Read that back to yourself a few time particularly the words 'majority' and 'neurodivergent'. 

Namely that if a majority of people are calling themselves 'neurodivergent', that means that a minority of people must be 'neurotypical'. So more people are 'diverging' from the 'typical' but still managing to be a majority of people or something? 

That sound you just heard? That's the sound of neurobabble crashing and burning yet again...

Are there 'millions missing' when it comes to adult autism?

Enhancing Adult Autism Diagnostic Pathways: The Role of Clinical Triage in Efficient Service Provision https://www.mdpi.com/2077-0383/14/9/2933

The Adamou paper sees the important peer-reviewed light of day having spent some time as a preprint.

It took 60 people referred to the "specialist adult Autism Service in West Yorkshire, UK, from November 2021 to August 2022" with suspected autism. Triage teams assessed them for autism including information from multiple sources and concluded that: "No clinical diagnoses of ASD were confirmed in the assessed sample."

This is an important paper requiring further follow-up. It tells us that there are perfectly good models of autism assessment triage that are available to healthcare systems such as the UK National Health Service (NHS) which can be used to work through the massive backlog of people awaiting an autism assessment (mostly children but adults as well). 

It also tells us that the stories that there are 'millions missing' in terms of adults with undiagnosed autism are probably not all accurate. Indeed, other evidence has come to a similar conclusions based on 'actual reporting' rather than 'we think there may be many undiagnosed people' estimated reporting: Characteristics and primary care experiences of people who self-report as autistic: a probability sample survey of adults registered with primary care services in England https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39277196/ "A total of 4481 of the 623 157 survey participants included in the analysis self-reported autism, yielding a weighted proportion estimate of 1.41% (95% CI 1.35% to 1.46%)." 

You don't need to be a rocket scientist to see the disparity between childhood autism diagnoses (~5%) and adult diagnoses (~1%) to see where the growth in numbers is coming from. Indeed, if one assumes that autism may be either prodromal for some and/or indeed, not universally lifelong for some, those stats make even more sense...