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Our account speculates that approximately 5% (1 in 20) people are Autistic as a *safe* estimate.

We derive this based on the most recent reports that 1 in 44 children in the united states are:

- Diagnosed with ASD
- And Reported to the CDC’s Autism and Developmental Disabilities Monitoring (ADDM) Network.

Relevant factors in extrapolating this statistic:

- Being Autistic and having a diagnosis of ASD are not the same thing. Only a subset of Autists can access the assessment and even then, only a subset of the Autists meet the criteria for ASD or are accurately diagnosed.

- Children are generally easier to DX as ASD as they have not yet learned to mask

- Mortality rate for Autists is ~3 times higher so Autists skew young

Factoring all this, it is easy to assume that for every child diagnosed with ASD AND reported there can be two children who:

- Are diagnosed and not reported
- Meet the criteria for ASD but are not diagnosed
- Have subclinical Autism.

Then you factor in the high mortality rate to bring it back down when considering the entire population.

We feel it is very safe and logical to assume that if 1/44 children in the United States are diagnosed as ASD and reported by their parents that we can approximate that 1/20 people are Autistic.

- A Note on Perception Bias -

Many Autists will say "But everyone I know is Autistic, it must be much higher!"

Autists due to genetics, shared environments, the double empathy problem, etc. ... are predisposed to interact with other Autists, in disproportionate numbers relative to the general population distribution. We are not saying that these estimates are not accurate, we are saying that a strong perception bias exists when Autists speculate on Autistic population distributions based on anecdotal evidence and personal experiences.

It could very likely be more than 5% of the population, its just the number that we feel confident in supporting based on the available published data.