Childhood autism is two to four times as common in Eindhoven, the centre of the Dutch information technology industry, as it is in two comparably sized Dutch cities with far fewer IT employees.

The result supports the suggestion that people who work in hi-tech engineering and computing industries, which demand the kinds of systemising and analytical skills often seen in people with autism, are more likely to have autistic children too.

Rising autism has also been seen in regions such as Silicon Valley, California. But the Dutch study claims to be the first to directly ask whether concentrations of IT workers mean more children with autism too.

City of geeks

Researchers analysed data on autism prevalence on 62,000 schoolchildren in three Dutch cities, each with populations of around quarter a million.


In Eindhoven, where 30 per cent of all jobs are in IT and computing industries, there were 229 cases of autism-spectrum disorders per 10,000 school-age children. This was more than double the corresponding figure of 84 in Haarlem and four times the figure of 57 in Utrecht. Each city has half as many IT jobs as Eindhoven.

By contrast, all three cities had the same prevalence of two other childhood psychiatric conditions unrelated to autism, namely attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and dyspraxia.

“These figures are pretty striking,” says Rosa Hoekstra of the Open University in Milton Keynes, UK.

In the family

Hoekstra says that she and her team leader, Simon Baron-Cohen of the Autism Research Centre in Cambridge, UK, decided to examine childhood autism systematically following anecdotal reports that cases were abnormally common in Eindhoven.

“The city is the technology hub for the Netherlands,” says Hoekstra. It has two universities devoted to high technology, and is the Dutch base for giants of the IT industry including IBM, ASML and Philips, which opened its first factory there in 1891.

In previous studies, Baron-Cohen has demonstrated that fathers and grandfathers of children with autism are unusually likely to be engineers and scientists. Likewise, mathematicians are more likely to have siblings with autism than the population at large, and studies in the UK, Japan and the Netherlands have demonstrated a higher-than-normal rate of autistic traits among engineering, science and mathematics students.

“Systematisation is the drive to predict how systems work, and to build and control them,” says Hoekstra. “So if you’re good at that it might mean you’re at increased risk of having a child with autism.”

Other explanations

In a second phase to the project, Hoekstra and colleagues hope to explore other possible explanations for the results.

One is that autism is overdiagnosed in Eindhoven and underdiagnosed in the other cities. Or there may be raised awareness of autism and better services for it in Eindhoven.

But she says that the results reflect trends in other hi-tech hubs, including California, where rates of autism-spectrum disorder soared 12-fold between 1987 and 2007, according to figures compiled by the California Department of Developmental Services in Sacramento.

More than a third were 9 or younger, and 82 per cent 19 or younger, suggesting a growing problem among children in California.

“Similar concerns have been raised in Silicon Valley,” says Hoekstra.

In the light of the new data, Hoekstra says it’s vital for hi-tech companies, universities and local governments to be on the alert for autism among both employees and their children. “They should be open to these possible difficulties and accommodate them,” she says.

Journal reference: Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, DOI: 10.1007/s10803-011-1302-1