Would you be surprised to hear about a midlife diagnosis of autism?
“Deacon Mark Paine knows something about that experience himself. The permanent deacon from the Archdiocese of Birmingham, England, wasn't diagnosed with autism until his late 40s. This mid-life diagnosis meant looking back over decades of life, including all those years sitting in church, with a new understanding of why he might have experienced certain things differently from the people around him.”
A new Catholic initiative puts autism in the pews
Well, you shouldn’t be.
What a Mid-Life Diagnosis of Autism Can Tell Us
Despite what you likely might hear from anti-vaccine influencers, there are many autistic older adults.
But again, this specific midlife diagnosis, a man who “wasn’t diagnosed with until his late 40s” is a good lesson for many people.
Why is his story so important?
It’s actually not to most of us (well, it is, but for different reasons), but if you are still concerned that vaccines are associated with autism, specifically the MMR vaccine, then you hopefully realize that we weren’t giving the MMR vaccine when he was a child.
In fact, the MMR wasn’t introduced in the UK until 1988, much later than when the US started using it in 1971.
What else?
Not surprisingly, there is no real difference in when autism rates started to rise in both countries!
And so the introduction of the MMR vaccine isn’t correlated to the rise in diagnosis of autism in either country!
Getting ready for anti-vaccine influencers to move some goalposts…
Well, then could it be the newborn hepatitis B vaccine?
It can’t be the newborn hepatitis B vaccine, as it was never added to the immunization schedule in the UK for all newborns.
And neither were the chickenpox (until 2026) nor hepatitis A vaccines, so you likely shouldn’t think to associate those with autism either.
What about DTaP and Prevnar? Autism was already on the rise when the UK started to use those vaccines.
But then there is the Hib vaccine! It was introduced in the early 1990s in both the US and the UK. Could it be associated with autism?
It would be a nice theory, except for the fact that there are many countries that have seen a rise in autism before they introduced Hib, like Japan and South Korea.
So what does this all mean?
It is even more evidence, for those that still need it, that vaccines are not associated with autism and that there are indeed older adults with autism.