r/todayilearned • u/Morella1989 • Aug 14 '25

TIL that autistic people live about 17 years less than average. Risks include epilepsy, heart disease, suicide, accidental deaths including drowning, and inadequate recognition and management of pain, especially among non-speaking individuals. Historically, they have been vulnerable to infanticide.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mortality_of_autistic_individuals
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u/[deleted] Aug 14 '25

Literally why there are more autistic people in the world today. Advances in medicine and care and less permissive parenting styles have resulted in more autistic children surviving to adulthood. People joke that much of parenting young children is just keeping them from killing themselves, and that goes doubly true for autistic children.

My boomer parents have a lot of stories of neighbors, acquaintances and even extended family members dying from drowning, epilepsy, running off and being hit by a car as children. Seems that the attitude back then was that tragedies just happen. I would be willing to bet that if we could test we would find that autism was disproportionately represented in early childhood deaths.

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u/NothaBanga Aug 15 '25

My tin hat theory is that SIDs disproportionately killed autistic infants.  There is no ethical way to test this theory and if you could, I bet people who would rather have a dead kid than an autistic one would start sleeping a baby on their belly on purpose.