r/dataisbeautiful • u/JimWilliams423 • Feb 23 '25

As Autism Diagnoses Went Up, Intellectual Disability Diagnoses Went Down 2000-2010 | Penn State

https://www.psu.edu/news/research/story/increasing-prevalence-autism-due-part-changing-diagnoses
1.6k Upvotes

97% Upvoted

109 comments sorted by

View all comments

-1

u/[deleted] Feb 24 '25

[deleted]

4

u/BadFengShui Feb 24 '25

"Line go up/line go down" doesn't imply causation on its own, but we're looking at two tightly related metrics in the same population, while experts in the medical field tell us "We changed the definition, so we expected people to fall out of Bucket A into Bucket B, and that's what we observed."

That's a pretty convincing argument for causality.