Nearly half of siblings of children with autism have difficulties with attention, language, learning or mood.

The latest estimate of autism prevalence suggests the condition is more common than previously thought, and highlights the complexity in the seemingly simple statistic.

About 1 in 45 children in the U.S. have autism, up 79 percent from the estimate for 2013. But there is more to the apparent jump in diagnoses than meets the eye.

Scientists can rattle off lists of dozens of genes linked to autism, but there’s much less agreement about which elements of the environment contribute to the condition — and by how much.

Roughly 13 percent of children with autism eventually lose their diagnosis, either because they outgrow it or because they never had autism to begin with.

Differences between the brains of men and women with autism may help explain why men are more susceptible to the condition and women appear to be protected from it.

Clinicians may need to go beyond the ‘masks’ to find autism in women.

Pregnant mice exposed to the antidepressant fluoxetine have pups with autism-like behavioral impairments.

Women who have lupus are roughly twice as likely as women without an immune disorder to have a child with autism.

An analysis of blood samples from nearly 17,000 individuals with autism points to new regions of the genome likely to be involved in the disorder.