Emerging findings in children with autism are showing both hyperconnectivity and underconnectivity in different regions and circuits throughout the brain.

In Ireland, children born to women who have emigrated from certain African countries are more likely to be diagnosed with autism, and to have more severe symptoms of the disorder, than their peers, says Louise Gallagher.

An effort to rank autism genes on the strength of the evidence implicating them in the disorder will provide researchers with a focused list of genes to study, says Alan Packer.
 
 

SHANK3, one of the strongest candidate genes for autism, has the potential to be a molecular entry point into understanding the synaptic, developmental and circuit origins of the disorder.
 

Guidelines for the use of electroencephalography in autism will ensure that researchers have a common set of standards, which will speed up discovery, say Sara Jane Webb and Raphael Bernier.

A gene’s length may influence its expression, and this has implications for autism, which tends to be linked to particularly long genes, says Mark Zylka. 

Rodent models that recapitulate the core features of autism often have additional traits, leading us to ask whether these traits are integral to autism, says Elisa Hill-Yardin.

Clinicians should place children under age 5 who have developmental delay into a broad diagnostic category, called ESSENCE, which may then resolve into any number of individual diagnoses over time, says Christopher Gillberg. 

Age-based cutoff scores for BISCUIT, an early diagnostic tool for children with autism traits, help clinicians accurately identify children who also have other disorders, says Johnny Matson.

Autism may be male-biased in prevalence, but our understanding of it should not be, argues Meng-Chuan Lai.