“The term completely disregards the difficulties these individuals have on a day-to-day basis,” says lead investigator Andrew Whitehouse, professor of autism research at the Telethon Kids Institute and the University of Western Australia in Perth, Australia.

What’s more, Whitehouse says, policymakers have used the term to decide which individuals should receive services or funding rather than carefully evaluating individual needs.

—Dalmeet Singh Chawla, in “Large study supports discarding the term ‘high-functioning autism’”