Spectrum: Autism Research News

Autistic people from historically marginalized races and ethnicities are more likely than their white peers to be diagnosed with accompanying health conditions.

In this edition of By the Numbers, we discuss how translation alters a screening tool’s accuracy, the closing racial gap in autism prevalence numbers, and the preponderance of autism without intellectual disability.

Almost 60 percent of autistic people may have an average or above-average intelligence quotient, according to a new longitudinal study.

Moving most clinical assessments online during the coronavirus pandemic has created a digital divide while closing some geographical ones, say Somer Bishop and Lonnie Zwaigenbaum.

Mounting evidence suggests that autism often involves upsets in homeostatic plasticity, a set of processes neurons use to stabilize their activity. These disruptions result from a range of autism-linked mutations and may help to explain the condition’s famed heterogeneity.

Loss of the gene KMT5B stunts growth in male mice and leads to social difficulties in female mice, a new study suggests.

Deleting the autism-linked gene CHD8 from specific cells in the cerebellum, a brain region important for movement, leads to motor deficits but does not alter social behaviors in mice.

Genes influence how autistic people react to sights, sounds and other sensory cues, whereas environmental factors shape their tendency to notice and seek out such stimuli, a new study in twins suggests.

A new viral tool can selectively control different types of neurons that dampen brain activity in rodents, monkeys and people.

Conversations between an autistic and a typical person involve less smiling and more mismatched facial expressions than do interactions between two typical people.