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Is AS more common in some parts of the country than others?

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Are kids with AS more common in some parts of the country than others or are they evenly distributed amongst centres of population? What this means is that in two towns of equal population picked at random is one likely to have a lot more kids with AS than the other, or are the numbers approximately equal for both? Also, in particular towns do some neighbourhoods have more kids with AS than others? If the population is distributed unevenly then what are most and least likely demographic profiles of areas where kids with AS reside?

 

I believe that kids with AS are not evenly distributed and there are localities where it is quite common (like every primary school has them) and other areas that are AS deserts.

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I would expect there to be significant regional distributions. There is plenty of evidence that the personalities of the parents are an indicator of the likelihood of a child having AS. So areas that tend to attract in certain types of parents will have a higher rates of AS.

 

The suggestion is that "technical" parents (engineers, IT, web and so on) are more likely to have AS children (Baron-Cohen certainly believes this to be the case) and that would imply a concentration of AS children in areas with a concentration of that sort of job. In US certainly there appears to be a high concentration of AS in Silicon valley.

 

The UK does not have as localised industries, but you might still expect a higher concentration around say the Thames Valley than in the areas with a more traditional industrial background (if there are any any more).

 

But also different areas are better at diagnosing AS - so areas which appear to have fewer AS children may simply be less good at diagnosing them at the primary level.

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I have an article somewhere about a concentration of kids with AS in Eindhoven which has a very large number of people working in electronics and software.

 

One parent thinks that kids with AS are more common in medium sized towns in the south of England, and are rarer in rural areas largely populated by people who were living there 100 years ago; some economically deprived parts of the north of England; in and around the Welsh valleys; and inner London.

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I have an article somewhere about a concentration of kids with AS in Eindhoven which has a very large number of people working in electronics and software.

 

One parent thinks that kids with AS are more common in medium sized towns in the south of England, and are rarer in rural areas largely populated by people who were living there 100 years ago; some economically deprived parts of the north of England; in and around the Welsh valleys; and inner London.

That would fit - that maps roughly on where the more technical jobs are

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Slight mistake. Should have said "largely populated by people descended from those who were living there 100 years ago".

 

I'm not sure if technical jobs are strongly correlated with the numbers of kids with AS. My parents aren't technical and I have encountered more kids with AS from non-technical parents than technical parents. Most are upper working or middle class. I have a feeling that kids with AS are rarer than average in some of the new towns like Basildon or Telford although Milton Keynes could buck this trend. I have wondered about badly economically deprived areas with a high percentage of council houses that are almost entirely white British and experience outward migration of people with very few moving in. Examples include Knowsley and parts of Teesside and Tyneside, possibly Hull. Kids with AS do seem a bit under represented in much of the London postcode area but there could be many factors at play here as it's a complicated area, although outer London is probably about average. I can't quite work out seaside towns with over half the population past retirement age that don't have many kids to start with. The south west is a bit mysterious. Only a few decades ago much of it was very rural with its own people but in recent times it has experienced a large population influx from the rest of Britain that complicates the situation.

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Your question reminds me of a public health module that I did over 10 years ago.

 

Some families feel their child doesn't need a diagnosis. They muddle along and manage to get support for their kids at school without their child being identified as on the spectrum. Other families struggle but live in an area where they cant get their child's autism recognised (when they and their child is struggling).

 

This means the number of diagnosed AS folk are a lot less than the actual numbers of AS folk.

 

My response in light of this is AS seems higher in some parts of the country than others because there is a clear pathway to diagnosis.

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This is something I have thought about. Do some environments exacerbate AS traits in a way where a certain individual might been seen as a bit eccentric in one place but has something seriously wrong with them in another place? If so, then could there be more unrecognised cases of AS in towns like Cambridge that have a high percentage of parents who are highly educated in technical subjects than in towns dominated by less educated parents? Is getting a diagnosis harder in some areas than others?

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A lot of parents in our support group,we know are educated, with good jobs, in management or professions such as medicine and teaching.we are very lucky to have the services others don't. I think you will find most of the prison population, are of people who have learning disabilities and on the spectrum, but have not been recognised by education authorities or their parents, and not had the support they needed, before ending up in trouble.

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