Boys who have autism-like social deficits at 2 years of age retain about the same level of social impairment when they reach age 20.

A variant of the FGF14 gene may decrease the volume of the amygdala, a brain structure needed to interpret emotions in facial expressions, according to results presented on Sunday at the World Congress of Psychiatric Genetics in Washington, D.C.

Healthy parents of children with autism have an atypical brain response to sound frequency changes that mimics the response of individuals with the disorder.

The brains of teenagers with autism and their unaffected siblings respond similarly to both happy and neutral faces, whereas those of controls seem to prefer happy ones, according to a study published 12 July in Translational Psychiatry.

Broken rules are even more distressing to people with autism than being excluded, according to a new study.

Studying the infant siblings of children who have autism to identify early signs of the disorder is expected to have enormous impact on the field from a clinical and a basic science standpoint, says psychologist Karen Dobkins.

Adults with autism who have high intelligence quotients (IQ) are better at identifying the direction of biological motion than are those with lower IQ scores, according to a study published 3 May in the Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders.

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.

Two large studies published in the past two months have found that traits linked to autism are widely distributed in the general population. Although about 1 in 100 children is diagnosed with autism, up to 30 percent of people may have at least one of the traits associated with the disorder.

An autism-associated gene variant of glyoxalase 1, or GLO1, leads to the buildup of a compound that is toxic to neurons, according to a study published 12 April in Autism Research.