3 Adult outcomes

Adult outcomes is the term for what happens to people with autism once they transition into adulthood. One reason that relatively little is known about outcomes is that autism was only identified in the 1940s, and it took several decades for the diagnosis to become well-known.

So until recently there have been relatively few adults on whom to base outcome studies. This situation is changing, and an increasing number of longitudinal studies have tracked the progress of children with autism into adulthood. Key findings from 25 such studies have been assembled and evaluated by Magiati et al. (2014).