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.

A new method for measuring severity in disorders such as autism can help researchers correct for the widely varying autism symptoms in the study participants, according to a paper published 2 May in NeuroImage.

New algorithms can analyze recordings of infants performing tasks that gauge their attention, suggesting a way to automate the detection of autism symptoms.

With the rate of autism now at 1 in 68 people and climbing, the need for solutions that reach the risk population more quickly and effectively has never been more real, say Dennis Wall and Glenn Saxe.

A new policy that aims to eliminate gender bias in animal and cell-based biomedical research is outlined in the 15 May Nature.
 

Parents may notice a loss of skills in their children as it is happening, but do not recall it clearly later on. The unpublished research, presented yesterday at the 2014 International Meeting for Autism Research in Atlanta, hints at a fatal flaw in diagnostic tools for autism that rely on parents’ memory.

Untrained volunteers can reliably detect signs of autism in children by watching home videos of the children posted on YouTube, suggests a study published 16 April in PLoS One. But critics say fundamental design flaws in the study undermine its results.

A Norwegian study published in February suggested that the Modified Checklist for Autism in Toddlers fails to detect many cases of autism at 18 months of age. The creators of the test explain why there’s more to the story.