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Out of curiosity, what is the basis for the idea that girls have an ability to camouflage or hide their symptoms better than boys? While trying to find information about this, I came across this meta-analytic review of gender differences in emotion expression in children[0], but without being in the field it's hard to make a link between emotion expression and ASD symptomatology.

[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3597769/



Camouflage is just one of the potential hypotheses out there, and the one with which I am least familiar. There are ideas about increased social-cognitive abilities in girls, allowing more effective masking/adaption. But it can also be the case that it is not merely camouflaging symptoms, but actually neural adaption and compensation that reduce or even eliminate symptoms. It could be that girls receive more social support than boys, and the one thing we do know about autism during early childhood is that early behavioral interventions can improve quality of life outcomes.




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