Spectrum: Autism Research News

Multiple levels of complexity make it challenging to develop drugs to treat autism.

In the last three years, autism researchers have gone from sequencing single genes to whole exomes, as highlighted at the Translational Neuroscience Symposium in Switzerland last week.

Postmortem brain tissue from people with autism shows differences in the expression of genes involved in a number of molecular pathways, including those that control cortical patterning, programmed cell death and differentiation, according to research published last month in PLoS Genetics.

Do rising rates of autism point to a true increase in prevalence or simply reflect a growing awareness and thus diagnosis of the disorder?

The largest brain imaging study ever performed has identified candidate genes that influence brain size and general intelligence, according to research published 15 April in Nature Genetics.

Parents searching for a genetic diagnosis for their child with autism now have a new option: a test that analyzes 62 different genes linked to syndromic autism, meaning cases of the disorder caused by mutation of a single gene.

A new study, published in the journal Pediatrics, made headlines this week by suggesting that motherhood obesity may increase the risk of autism in children.

People with autism have diverse brain response to different textures, according to a study that measures the sensory difficulties associated with the disorder.

The largest set of exome sequencing studies of children with autism and their families to date has identified a handful of genes that may increase risk of the disorder, according to research published in Nature.

Children with autism are bullied three times more than their typically developing siblings, according to research from the Interactive Autism Network.