Knowledge Bank

High-profile publications and government reports state “people with autism die 16 years earlier” or have a “54-year life expectancy,” citing Hirvikoski and colleagues’ rigorous, landmark study of mortality among autistic people. Yet, under 3% of autistic people died during the study’s observation period, making conclusions about the average age of death for the entire autistic sample, or about the life expectancy of all autistic people, a misrepresentation of findings. We sought to systematically determine the degree to which findings from Hirvikoski et al., 2016 were represented accurately in the scientific literature via a citation context analysis.