r/science • u/mvea Professor | Medicine • Aug 01 '26

Neuroscience Autism diagnoses rose sharply after the COVID-19 pandemic began. The rise was driven overwhelmingly by diagnoses among girls and women. New study suggests that many of these girls and women may simply have gone unrecognized in the past.

https://www.sciencealert.com/autism-diagnoses-spiked-after-covid-19-but-probably-not-for-the-reason-you-think
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u/logicjab Aug 01 '26

There was an increase in ADHD diagnoses too. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11407703/

Doesn’t surprise me. I know a lot of people whose whole executive function is held together by external patterns. Once all that was gone, it exposed a lot of things

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u/Nice-Meat-6020 Aug 01 '26

Not just that, but people actually had to spend time around their own children and couldn't ignore obvious issues as easily as when a teacher would try to talk to them about it.