Men with fragile X syndrome have larger brains overall than controls do, but less matter in regions involved in language and social interaction.

The brains of people with autism show three distinct periods of abnormal development — overgrowth in infancy, prematurely arrested growth in childhood, and shrinking between adolescence and middle age — according to a study in Brain Research.

At birth, children with autism have lower blood levels of a class of antibody produced in response to infection compared with healthy controls, according to a report published in December in Autism Research.

The brains of children with autism show differences in gene expression compared with those of healthy controls, especially in genes that control cell growth. Adults with autism also have aberrant gene expression, but in different pathways, researchers reported Sunday at the Society for Neuroscience annual meeting in San Diego.

Chemicals produced by their mother’s immune system in utero alter the size of several key brain regions in people with schizophrenia, enlarging chambers that store cerebrospinal fluids, and shrinking parts of the cortex involved in processing emotion and memory.

A drug that interferes with a biochemical pathway important in cancer can reverse some brain defects in mouse models of fragile X syndrome, according to a study published 11 August in the Journal of Neuroscience.

The protein missing in fragile X syndrome is necessary for the proper development of neural stem cells — self-renewing cells that can differentiate into more specialized types, including neurons — according to a paper published in the August issue of Human Molecular Genetics.

Children with fragile X syndrome show abnormal growth in several brain structures during the first few years of life, according to the first study to track how the disease unfolds in the brain during early development.

Babies born to rhesus monkeys infected with the flu virus during pregnancy have significantly smaller brains than normal, and other brain abnormalities seen in schizophrenia, researchers have found. The study, published last month in Biological Psychiatry, provides the first evidence in non-human primates linking flu infection to a higher risk of schizophrenia.

Brain imaging reveals distinct signatures in the language circuits of young toddlers with autism while they sleep, according to unpublished data presented yesterday at the IMFAR 2010 meeting in Philadelphia.