Brief report: data about autism in Brazil

Background: Considering the prevalence of autism, the early identification of autism in Brazil is important since a significant amount of children are in conditions considered at risk to development. An early identification can contribute to a different diagnosis from other development problems and support an intervention. Behavioral categories related to social skills and affection have been traditionally used for diagnosis in clinic. Those categories would be basically the ones described in ICD-10 and in DSM-IV-TR. Experienced clinicians rely mainly on social and affective criteria. Therefore, screening for autism usually takes place in the psychiatric clinic, also looking for intervention.

Objectives: The goal of this research was to collect epidemiological data about autism in child and adolescent psychiatric clinic in the Hospital of the University of Brasília - DF.

Methods: In a total of 450 appointments scheduled for 2007, there were 179 patients. Patients, whose records were not found, without proper identification and without records from psychiatric clinic related to the year 2007, were excluded. Finally, 149 patient records were examined.

Results: There were 14 (9,40%) diagnostic hypothesis of Pervasive Development Disorder, with 8 (5,37%) specific diagnosis for childhood autism. There were 2 girls and 12 boys with 2 pairs of twins. The average age in the 1st appointment was of 8,58 years of age, the youngest being about 2,58 years old and the oldest, 13,33 years old. 

Conclusions: The high prevalence of autism found may be due to special attention to autism lately and more demand as the child and adolescent psychiatric clinic is considered more specialized for those cases. One problem of this study was the loss of data due to archive research. Further studies could investigate the age of the first diagnosis, diagnostic criteria and validation, and collect data from a larger period of time.