High-Resolution Mapping of Healthcare Pathways in Autism

Autistic children and adolescents in Sweden show increased risk for 165 of 187 examined conditions, with excess morbidity clustering into seven system-dominant domains rather than spreading across the phenome.

• Why it matters: It is unclear whether autistic excess psychiatric and somatic morbidity follows structured diagnostic patterns or specific temporal trajectories, limiting population-level understanding of where healthcare burden concentrates.
• What they did: Using nationwide Swedish registers, 101,521 autistic individuals were followed from birth through early life to a median age of 19.8 years and compared with 958,093 age- and sex-matched peers across 12.86 million diagnostic codes from 9.49 million inpatient and specialist outpatient encounters.
• The result: Temporal analyses indicate autism-enriched diagnostic sequences concentrate within respiratory, congenital, and mental-injury/poisoning-related domains, enabling a population-level framework for the domains driving excess healthcare burden.

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