By treating the medical complications that accompany Rett syndrome, women with the disorder are living longer than ever before, says Alan Percy. 

A long-awaited report, published today in Nature, confirms that with access to tens of thousands of genomes, researchers can identify common genetic risk factors for a complex neuropsychiatric disorder.

Autism researchers collaborate a great deal, says Helen Tager-Flusberg, and collaboration has increased over the past five years — most likely reflecting the maturation of the field and the greater opportunities to meet.

With the rate of autism now at 1 in 68 people and climbing, the need for solutions that reach the risk population more quickly and effectively has never been more real, say Dennis Wall and Glenn Saxe.

The number of people in a study, the proportion of male and female participants, and many other factors can affect research on sex differences in autism, says Thomas Frazier.

When individuals with autism see themselves as impaired and get stuck on those thoughts, they may become and stay depressed, says Katherine Gotham.

There are no available medications for treating autism’s core symptoms, but there are several candidates in clinical trials. Jeremy Veenstra-VanderWeele describes the factors researchers must take into account when developing drugs for the disorder.

Chris Gunter and Daniel MacArthur discuss guidelines for assessing the evidence that a genetic variant causes autism or another disorder.

Autism, schizophrenia and intellectual disability share underlying deficits in pathways that regulate how the brain encodes new experiences, says Jason Shepherd.

In the past few years, several studies have implicated fathers’ age more strongly than mothers’ in increasing autism risk. Although older fathers have more spontaneous mutations in their sperm than younger fathers do, no one has shown that these accumulating mutations contribute to autism risk in their children, argues Daniel Weinberger.