Premature mortality in a population‐based cohort of autistic adults in Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Research from different countries suggests that autistic adults are more likely to die prematurely than non-autistic adults, but these studies do not always investigate male and female individuals separately and do not consider whether this pattern is unique to autistic people or is also an issue for people with other developmental disabilities. We examined premature mortality in autistic males and females (assigned at birth) in a population-based cohort, compared to males and females with and without other developmental disabilities. Using linked administrative health and social services population data from Ontario, Canada, age-matched males and females aged 19-65 years were followed between 2010 and 2016, and causes of death were determined. Over the 6-year observation period, 330 of 42,607 persons (0.77%) in the group without developmental disabilities had died compared to 259 of 10,646 persons (2.43%) in the autism group and 419 of 10,615 persons (3.95%) in the other developmental disabilities group. Autistic males and females were more likely to die than non-autistic males (adjusted risk ratio, RR 3.13, 95%CI 2.58-3.79) and non-autistic females (adjusted RR 3.12, 95%CI 2.35-4.13) without developmental disabilities, but were less likely to die than adults with other developmental disabilities (males: adjusted RR 0.66, 95%CI 0.55-0.79; females: adjusted RR 0.55, 95%CI 0.43-0.71). Most common causes of death varied depending on a person's sex and diagnosis. Given the greater likelihood of premature mortality in adults with developmental disabilities including autism, greater attention and resources directed toward their health and social care are needed, tailored to their sex and diagnosis-informed needs. LAY SUMMARY: This study looked at how many autistic men and women died over 6 years (2010-2016), along with how they died, and compared this to adults who did not have autism living in Ontario, Canada. It found that autistic men and women were more than three times as likely to die as people of the same age who did not have a developmental disability. However, adults with other developmental disabilities besides autism were even more likely to die than autistic adults. This means that we have to pay more attention and invest in better social and health care for autistic people, along with people who have other types of developmental disabilities.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".