Sensory sensitivity is one of the most understudied aspects of autism. That’s a serious problem, because it underlies much of the distress experienced by people with the disorder, says best-selling author and animal scientist Temple Grandin.
An innovative academic program in New York City public schools is successfully educating children with high-functioning autism alongside their unaffected peers.
Parents see more benefits to a diagnosis of autism than their affected children do — perhaps unsurprising, given young people’s overwhelming desire to fit in with their peers.
Individuals with autism have multiple mutations in a pathway that functions in the mitochondria, the energy center of the cell, according to a study published 27 April in the European Journal of Human Genetics. They also have higher-than-average numbers of variants in pathways involved in metabolism, gene expression and the regulation of cell division.
Teenage boys with Asperger syndrome with higher-than-average scores on tests of abstract reasoning fare worse than controls on short-term memory and ability to filter out distractions.
Few scientists have a career that spans as wide a spectrum in autism research as Simon Baron-Cohen, professor of developmental psychopathology at the University of Cambridge in the U.K. And fewer still garner effusive compliments from those who don’t agree with them.
Diagnosing autism in children is difficult enough, but detecting the disorder in adults is even more complicated.
As awareness about autism has spread in California, lower-income families have become more likely to seek a diagnosis of autism, says a new study.
Individuals with autism use more brainpower in regions linked to visual perception, and less in those related to planning thoughts and actions, compared with healthy controls, according to a multi-study analysis published today in Human Brain Mapping.