Rushed doctors and lack of culturally appropriate screening tools are boosting autism diagnoses in India.

Understanding why some children appear to outgrow their autism diagnosis may provide clues about the biology of the disorder but shouldn’t dictate treatment decisions, says Deborah Fein.

Experimental drugs can reverse the effects of some autism-linked mutations in the dopamine transporter, a protein that shuttles the chemical messenger dopamine into neurons. Researchers presented the unpublished findings in five posters yesterday at the 2014 Society for Neuroscience annual meeting in Washington, D.C.

Restricted behaviors in autism represent a genetic link with inattention and hyperactivity in attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, say Tinca Polderman and Henrik Larsson.

A brain hub responsible for higher-order tasks may be overly connected in autism and thinly connected in attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.

CHD8, a gene that regulates the structure of DNA, is the closest thing so far to an ‘autism gene,’ suggests a study published today in Cell. People with mutations in this gene all have the same cluster of symptoms, including autism.

The growing prevalence of autism is no different from that of other neurodevelopmental disorders, finds a study of more than 4.5 million people in four countries.

A Swedish twin study plans to search for the shared genetic and environmental origins of autism and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, which are often mistaken for each other.

A small study published 3 April in Molecular Autism has found that 98 percent of mothers of children with autism have unusual responses to sensory stimuli, including light, sound and touch.
 

Children born to women who have low levels of the thyroid hormone have a moderately increased risk of developing autism, according to a large Danish study published 10 March in BJOG: An International Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology.