Girls and boys show telling differences in social and repetitive behaviors well before receiving an autism diagnosis, helping to explain the gender gap in diagnostic rates.

Watch the complete replay of David Skuse and William Mandy’s webinar on why reported sex ratios for autism may be fundamentally flawed.

A set of small molecules in the blood can distinguish people with autism from controls with 81 percent accuracy, claims a biotech firm, but the test faces a long and difficult road to clinical use.

People with autism show unique patterns of brain activation when thinking about social words, such as ‘hug.’ But new findings highlight the dangers of using thoughts as biomarkers for the disorder.

New guidelines aim to help clinicians diagnose autism when standardized diagnostic tests produce mixed results for the same child.

Soft touch and physical closeness to other people wire the social brain right from the earliest days after birth, and problems in the response to touch may play a fundamental role in autism. This picture emerges from unpublished results presented by several teams at the 2014 Society for Neuroscience annual meeting in Washington, D.C.

Children with autism and their parents share movement patterns imperceptible to the human eye, according to unpublished results presented today at the 2014 Society for Neuroscience annual meeting in Washington, D.C.

Standard screening tools translated into Hindi and Bengali reliably distinguish Indian children with autism from their unaffected peers.

At its core, autism is the same disorder worldwide. But most screening methods for the disorder were developed in the U.K. and U.S., and linguistic and cultural differences can alter their performance elsewhere.

Epidemiological ‘just-so’ stories, which infer causes of autism from general trends in prevalence, are in danger of repeating the mistakes of social Darwinism, says Mayada Elsabbagh.