Spectrum: Autism Research News

Girls with an autism diagnosis have more severe impairments in social communication than boys with the diagnosis.

A greater proportion of 3-year-old girls than boys with autism have psychiatric features such as anxiety and moodiness.

Children with autism show much less restraint when confronted with one of their interests, compared with their typical peers.

Pediatricians disagree with specialists 25 percent of the time on whether a child should receive an autism diagnosis.

Researchers have built a tablet-based tool that uses machine learning to make screening for autism easy and efficient.

People with autism use different brain regions than typical people do to distinguish between the scents of familiar and unfamiliar individuals.

Language difficulties and emotional challenges such as anxiety or aggression in children with autism at age 3 predict their social skills at around age 5.

The gene-editing tool CRISPR may cause thousands of off-target mutations, but critics say it’s way too soon to accuse it of infidelity.

Genes linked to autism are critical to the development of star-shaped brain cells called astrocytes, suggesting a key role for the cells in the condition.

The Austrian doctor Hans Asperger cooperated extensively with the Nazi regime and may have sent dozens of children to their deaths.