Expert clinicians can diagnose autism by age two, but the U.S. has a shortage of specialists. Average diagnosis happens around age four, sometimes much later in underserved areas. Early intervention matters for brain development, so delays mean missed critical windows.
Autism can be reliably diagnosed by an expert clinician by about 2 years of age, and then I think if there's features that are more pronounced, you can get an earlier diagnosis. But one of the issues in the U.S. is that because these specialists are needed and there's not enough of them, there's very long clinic wait times that could be a year and a half in some instances. And so even though we can reliably diagnose autism with these behavioral criteria, the average age of an autism diagnosis in the U.S. is 4 years. Years of age, and it's actually even higher in areas that are impoverished or lack medical specialists. And so most of the data say that if you want to intervene, you need to do it as early as possible. And so we're missing some of these critical brain development windows by having this delayed diagnosis.
The Library of Minds: Brain Coach: How to Stay Sharp When AI Does the Thinking | Jim Kwik
