Why are detectable rates of autism soaring in the U.S. but holding steady in other countries with a history of far better screening? It’s not vaccines or chemicals but ‘diagnosis inflation’

Almost every week, it seems, we read news of some new epidemic — medical, psychological, social. Taken together, these alarming trends look like an enormous material shift: … But simultaneous crises may also be part of a broader story: We are simply looking harder and more expansively for malady and disorder, and as a result identifying more and more people as ailing or atypical.

Others have called this diagnostic inflation or diagnostic creep, and it has formed a subgenre of research and writing on health for a decade or two now.

Perhaps the signal example is autism, whose spectacular rise in prevalence is a matter of renewed popular salience, thanks to MAHA, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and particularly Kennedy’s war on vaccines. … But as the psychiatrist Allen Frances wrote last month in a guest essay for Times Opinion, the stark rise has relatively little to do with environmental contamination, vaccines or even an increasing incidence of autistic symptoms themselves — and much more to do with the way diagnostic guidelines have evolved.

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