• Posted April 29, 2025

No Greater Risk Of Brain Aging Among People With Autism

People with autism do not appear to be at greater risk of age-related brain decline, a new study says.

Older people with autistic traits have no differences when it comes to spatial working memory, which helps folks remember and use information about where things are and how they are arranged, researchers reported April 24 in the journal The Gerontologist.

“Our work provides no support for any difference between autistic people and neurotypical people in terms of increased risk of age-related cognitive decline,” researcher Joshua Stott, a professor of aging and clinical psychology at University College London, said in a news release.

Spatial working memory can sometimes become less effective as people age. This decline can be part of normal aging, but it also can be more pronounced in people with dementia or Alzheimer’s disease, researchers said in background notes.

“It is known that autistic people often also have cognitive differences relative to non-autistic people,” Stott said. “In light of this and a current global World Health Organization-led focus on prevention of cognitive decline and dementia, there has been considerable interest whether having a neurodevelopmental condition like autism can affect your risk of age-related cognitive decline, and potentially dementia.”

For the new study, researchers analyzed data for more than 13,000 people 50 and older in the U.K. who had been assessed for signs of autism. These included difficulty with social communication and interaction, and restricted or repetitive behaviors or interests.

They found that about 1.5% of the participants had high levels of autistic traits, comparable to estimates of autism in the general public.

Tracking everyone over a seven-year period, the study found that most people maintained their brain health whether or not they had autistic traits.

This suggests that people with autism are not more likely to experience brain decline, at least in this area, researchers concluded.

“Understanding how aging intersects with autism is an important yet understudied topic,” senior researcher Gavin Stewart, a postdoctoral research fellow at King’s College London, said in a news release.

“Getting older often comes with a range of changes, including in health and cognition,” he continued. “As autistic people can be at greater risk of certain health problems and have cognitive differences to non-autistic people, we need to know whether autistic people will have different patterns of aging than their non-autistic peers.”

Stewart said the study "provides some reassuring evidence that some aspects of cognition change similarly" among people with and without autism.

Researchers said future studies should track people for a longer time and include a wider age range. These studies also should include people who meet the diagnostic criteria for autism, they said.

More information

The Autism Research Institute has more on autism and aging.

SOURCE: University College London, news release, April 24, 2025