Home videos suggest that babies later diagnosed with autism gesture differently than typically developing babies or those with other developmental disorders.

Postmortem brains from individuals with autism allow researchers to look at patterns of gene expression in different cell types, and to understand the interplay among neurons and neural circuits, says Dan Arking.

Parents of minority children with autism are more likely to report that their children have poor quality of care than are parents of minority children with other developmental disabilities.

The first approved stem cell trial for autism will soon be under way. Is there a rationale for testing stem cells to improve symptoms of the disorder?
 

Rather than make blanket decisions, doctors must gauge the level of cognitive impairment in individuals with autism when considering them for organ transplants, says bioethicist Arthur Caplan.

Among siblings of children with autism, those with better prefrontal cortex functioning — observable as relatively strong executive functions for their age — are better able to compensate for atypicalities in other brain systems early in life, and are therefore less likely to receive a diagnosis of autism later in their development, argues Mark H. Johnson.

Genes and the environment each influence the role of the other in determining the risk of developing autism. Genetics can determine how susceptible one is to the environment, and environmental factors can influence gene expression and introduce mutations, says immunologist Janine LaSalle.

Research into the ability of children with autism to imitate has produced contradictory results: Some studies find that those with the disorder have difficulty imitating people, whereas others find no problems. A new study explores why.

The assumption in some published overviews of autism tends to be that all of the problems relevant to the disorder can be found at synapses, the junctions between neurons. But it’s difficult not to notice the striking number of chromatin-associated genes that have emerged as candidate risk factors over the past few months.

SAGE Labs has announced a new partnership with the autism science and advocacy organization Autism Speaks to fund the creation of three new rat models of autism.