Step into Mason’s world | CNN

EDITOR’S NOTE: April is Autism Acceptance Month. (CNN) — One in 31: That’s the estimated number of children identified as having autism spectrum disorder by age 8 in the United States, according to the most recent data from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That number has been going up for decades. It was around 1 in 150 in 2000, and it was thought to be fewer than 5 per 10,000 children in the early 1980s. According to experts, three main reasons account for the lion’s share of the growth over the years: increased awareness, improved screening tools and the expansion of the diagnostic criteria to include a much wider range of people. There are two main components of autism spectrum disorder, Dr. Matthew Lerner told CNN Chief Medical Correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta recently on his podcast “Chasing Life.” Lerner is director of the Social Connections and Treatment Lab at the A.J. Drexel Autism Institute. “Autism spectrum disorder in the current DSM [the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders published by the American Psychiatric Association] has sort of two groups of criteria,” he said. “One is in the social and communication domain: