Objectives: The goal of this research was to collect epidemiological data about autism in child and adolescent psychiatric clinic in the Hospital of the
Methods: In a total of 450 appointments scheduled for 2007, there were 179 patients. Patients, whose records were not found, without proper identification and without records from psychiatric clinic related to the year 2007, were excluded. Finally, 149 patient records were examined.
Results: There were 14 (9,40%) diagnostic hypothesis of Pervasive Development Disorder, with 8 (5,37%) specific diagnosis for childhood autism. There were 2 girls and 12 boys with 2 pairs of twins. The average age in the 1st appointment was of 8,58 years of age, the youngest being about 2,58 years old and the oldest, 13,33 years old.
Conclusions: The high prevalence of autism found may be due to special attention to autism lately and more demand as the child and adolescent psychiatric clinic is considered more specialized for those cases. One problem of this study was the loss of data due to archive research. Further studies could investigate the age of the first diagnosis, diagnostic criteria and validation, and collect data from a larger period of time.