New federal studies coauthored by autism experts at Rutgers found that more children have been diagnosed with autism than at any time since monitoring began more than two decades ago. According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), about 4 percent of 8-year-old boys and 1 percent of 8-year-old girls in the U.S. have autism. These estimates are the highest since the CDC’s Autism and Developmental Disabilities Monitoring (ADDM) Network was created in 2000. Biennial studies from the ADDM Network, which analyzed data from 2020, were coauthored by Walter Zahorodny, director of the New Jersey Autism Study at the Rutgers New Jersey Medical School, and Josephine Shenouda, a Rutgers epidemiologist. To read the full story.