Autistic children grow up into autistic adults.

But why do we have a shorter life expectancy than those without autism?

By Georgina Bailey

Autism is expensive.

Long-term research that involved following a group of individuals with autism for two decades indicates that the average life expectancy for some autistic people is about 39 years ( DaWalt et al, 2019) and that stigma can shorten the life of an autistic even more (Turnock et al, 2019).