Young boys continue to have the highest rate of autism diagnoses, but Danish doctors are diagnosing more girls, teenagers and adults with the disorder than they did in the mid-1990s. That’s the finding from a 16-year study published 20 February in the Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders.

Targeted training opportunities and comprehensive guidelines can help community physicians diagnose many cases of autism, say Evdokia Anagnostou and Jessica Brian.

A teenager with fragile X syndrome carries a rare mutation that changes a single amino acid in the FMRP protein, researchers reported 22 January in the European Journal of Human Genetics.

It takes more mutations to trigger autism in women than in men, which may explain why men are four times more likely to have the disorder, according to a study published 26 February in the American Journal of Human Genetics.

Evidence is finally accumulating that early diagnosis and behavioral interventions improve the lives of people with autism. Even so, increasingly the question isn’t just whether early intervention works but also the best age at which to intervene.

More than 70 percent of autism studies don’t record the ethnicity of their participants, and fewer than half of those that do analyze the impact of the data, reports a review published 4 February in the Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders.

The social lives of people with autism remain poor well into adulthood, and they struggle to find the sense of well-being and fulfillment that comes from meeting one’s own goals and expectations, conclude two new reviews of long-term studies in people with the disorder.

Most of the children who would lose their autism diagnosis under the diagnostic criteria released last year will fall under the new category of social (pragmatic) communication disorder, reports a large study of Korean children. The study was published last week in the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry.

A shortage of trained doctors, lack of awareness and long waiting lists for specialized care delay diagnosis and treatment of autism in many low- and middle-income countries, report two new studies.

Researchers must make heterogeneity in autism the object of their investigation, rather than treating it as an excuse for inconsistent results or an inconvenience in their quest to understand the disorder’s essence, argues Jon Brock.