Girls who show severe emotional or behavioral problems are more likely to be diagnosed with autism than those who do not, suggests a new study1.
The findings may help to explain why some girls with autism go undiagnosed or are diagnosed later than boys.
Girls in the study were just as likely as boys to show certain autism features, such as poor awareness of social cues. But “having these traits is not necessarily enough for a diagnosis,” says senior investigator Kirstin Greaves-Lord, head of the Autism Research Collaboration at Erasmus MC-Sophia Children’s Hospital and Yulius Mental Health in the Netherlands.
Girls may also need to show emotional or behavioral problems as a prerequisite for diagnosis, Greaves-Lord says. The work was published 9 December in Autism.
“It suggests that if you’re a girl and you want to get a diagnosis, you’d better be disruptive,”
Read more here at Spectrum.
