Behaviours of Concern and Autism

Statistics

It is difficult to be precise about the number of autistic people with behaviours of concern for a number of reasons including the fact that the number depends on which definition you are using.  However it is clear that behaviours of concern are more common in autistic people than in ‘neurotypical’ people.  Different reviews have provided different estimates of the numbers. For example,

• Matson et al (2009) reported that 94.3% of children on the autism  spectrum have been reported to display some form of challenging behaviour
• Matson et al (2011) reported that in a study of children with ASD, 13–30% were found to engage in severe challening behaviours. In a clinical sample of adults with intellectual disability and co-morbid ASD, 87.9% were noted to engage in CBs.  

Some researchers report that behaviours of concern are more common in autistic people with ‘severe’ autism and/or who also have learning disabilities. For example,

• Hutchins and Prelock (2014) stated ‘Recent prevalence estimates of challenging behaviors in individuals with ASD/ID range from 35.8% to 64.3% with most studies reporting that more than half of these individuals engage in more than one challenging behavior.  Not surprisingly, the severity of challenging behaviors is related to both AS and ID severity and the rates for individuals with ASD and ASD/ID are substantially higher than individuals diagnosed with ID alone (i.e., 10-15%).’

Updated

21 Sep 2022