Medical News Today described Autism Spectrum Disorder as a widespread neurodevelopmental disorder that attacks the regular brain functions of an individual, including the person’s communication and social interaction capabilities. People with autism may also encounter problems with non-verbal communication, and activities that require the element of play. Almost 1% of the world’s population are diagnosed with this condition, as stated by Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). In fact, 1 in 100 children ages between 2-5 are reported to be diagnosed with autism.
According to an article posted in Time Health, written by Alice Park, boys are five times more likely to develop autism because men tend to have a thinner cortex than women. Brain scientists explained that the thinness of the cortex or the brain’s outer layer, which is surrounded with countless nerves, may heavily affect several types of cognitive skills such as memory and reasoning. But behind all these undeniable facts, a recent study implied that autism is principally a dilemma to women.
Why is it more difficult to diagnose autism spectrum in women?
According to Maia Szalavits’ article, posted in Scientific American, girls with autism may be more difficult to diagnose because of several complicated factors like the criteria, particularly created around males, overlapping maladies like obsessive-compulsive disorder, and some female autism patients are sometimes presumed as cases similar to male patients.
National Autistic Society stated that one factor is that the common variables of health experts are mostly men due to its ratio to female patients which is 2:1.
What do you mean by “Masking Autism Behavior”?
“Masking Autism Behavior” is a form of metaphorical camouflage wherein an autism patient is not easily detected as a person living with autism spectrum, just because sometimes, some characteristics of the condition are not that obvious, according to Science Daily.
Many people may, somehow, be disregarding a lot of girls who are at risk and at the same time, undiagnosed as autism patients for the reason that girls are rather good at “masking” autism traits than boys. Some health experts conducted playground observations, involving female and male autism patients.
The findings aforementioned that female autism patients were more likely to interact with their mates or that their socializing behavior seemed to be positive. Meanwhile, some boys with autism remained preoccupied with a specific toy or activity, rather than cooperating with their peers. In addition, most girls with autism may also be misjudged sometimes as “girly” or the usual girl-type attitude or girl interests which makes other autism attributes ambiguous.
Some researchers say that there are instances wherein female patients were diagnosed only in their later years. However, there’s still no certain recorded number of these patients.
Moreover, this is a good case to be studied because health experts might not know if there are patients out there who keeps struggling with this condition but are not yet diagnosed.