Short answers, pulled from the story.
Paul Eugen Bleuler coined the term Autismus in 1911 to describe a symptom of schizophrenia rather than a distinct condition of childhood. He derived the word from the Greek autos meaning self to characterize social withdrawal in adults retreating from reality into their own subjective worlds.
Grunya Sukhareva published an article about six boys in 1926 who exhibited abstract thinking and an autistic attitude that closely mirrors modern diagnostic criteria. Her work laid the groundwork for recognizing autism as a unique developmental profile yet was largely overlooked in the West for decades.
Autism has a strong genetic basis involving hundreds of different genes that influence brain structure in similar ways. Twin studies indicate that autism is highly heritable with genetic factors explaining most of the risk and shared environmental effects playing a minor role.
Scientific consensus confirms that vaccines do not cause autism despite the fraudulent 1998 study by Andrew Wakefield. A 2014 meta-analysis examined ten major studies involving 1.25 million children worldwide and concluded that neither the vaccine preservative thimerosal nor the MMR vaccine leads to autism.
The World Health Organization estimates that about 1 in 100 children were diagnosed with autism between 2012 and 2021. This rise is largely attributable to changes in diagnostic practices referral patterns availability of services and public awareness particularly among women.
Intellectual disabilities are among the most common co-occurring conditions affecting 30% to 40% of autistic people. Anxiety disorders co-occur in 17% to 23% of autistic people and depression rates range from 9% to 13%.