Reacción a "The incidence of autism is similar in boys and girls, although boys are diagnosed earlier"

This paper is timely and provides important support for what autism researchers have known for a long-time: that autism is markedly undiagnosed in people assigned female at birth. The study's longitudinal follow-up of young people is essential, because the signs of autism are often only visible at a slightly later age in girls; this means that studies which only look at toddlers may well miss autistic features which are already present in males but not yet visible in females. Moreover, since the study uses national data, this means that it's unaffected by biases in who chooses to opt in or opt out to the data.

Vitally, this study corroborates what studies have already shown us - it's not the first to show that if you follow children over time so as to account for the later emergence of autistic features in girls, you'll find that the prevalence of autism is far more equal across male and female children (Burrows et al., 2022) - that study actually found a 1:1 ratio.

Equally importantly, since we have records of the proportions of autism diagnosed in males and females over the years, these findings - showing us now that autism actually occurs far more evenly across people assigned male and female at birth - support other convincing evidence that very large numbers of autistic women are undiagnosed, especially older undiagnosed women (Stewart and Happe, 2026). And what we know about undiagnosed autistic people is that being undiagnosed is often associated with severe difficulties and even suicidality (Moseley et al., 2025) - so underdiagnosis of autism, like ADHD, should be of serious concern.