In mice with a mutated copy of SHANK3, stress induces social deficits and alters gene expression in certain excitatory neurons. But eliminating a stress-related protein that regulates SHANK3 restores typical social functioning in the animals.
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.
Children who are diagnosed with autism before age 2 and a half years show more gains in their social skills than children who are diagnosed later.
Autism prevalence in the United States rose to 1 in 44 children in 2018, up from 1 in 54 in 2016.
This edition of By the Numbers logs the continued underrepresentation of Black speakers at neuroscience meetings, mildly-effective cognitive behavioral therapy and early autism diagnoses.
Cortical organoids that contain non-neuronal brain cells called microglia may reflect human neurodevelopment more faithfully than those that don’t.
These short reports from Spectrum journalists highlight some of the autism-related findings that caught our attention at the meeting this past week.
Technical issues have plagued the 2021 Society for Neuroscience annual meeting, with presenters unable to log in for their virtual poster sessions and battling auto-captioning quirks.
The percentage of Black researchers presenting at neuroscience conferences has increased by only a meager amount since the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020.
Sir Michael Rutter, widely hailed as the ‘father of child psychiatry,’ was part of the team that first showed autism has a genetic component. He died 23 October at age 88.