A recently released Rutgers and CDC study shows New Jersey with a shockingly high autism rate in one age group. And it’s tripled.
By Tom Davis, Patch National Staff
Updated Apr 12, 2019 1:33 pm ET
New Jersey has a shockingly high autism rate in one age group – the highest ever recorded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, researchers say. And nobody seems to know why.
The report, released Thursday by Rutgers University and the CDC, found that about one in 59 4-year-old children has autism in America. New Jersey’s rate was the highest of the states studied: one in 35.
That puts the national rate of autism at 1.7 percent of the 4-year-old childhood population and New Jersey’s autism rate at 3 percent. Twenty years ago, the New Jersey rate was 1 percent.
Walter Zahorodny, an associate professor of pediatrics at Rutgers New Jersey Medical School who directed the New Jersey portion of the study, called the results “consistent, broad and startling.”
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