The first comprehensive autism study in South Korea has found that the prevalence of the disorder is more than double the number in the United States.

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.

Few scientists have a career that spans as wide a spectrum in autism research as Simon Baron-Cohen, professor of developmental psychopathology at the University of Cambridge in the U.K. And fewer still garner effusive compliments from those who don’t agree with them.

Things are getting better for women in science, but we are still far from a world in which gender is irrelevant.

Animal research hints that sex hormones may be responsible for the gender bias in autism. More research is needed in people to back this up, says a new review.

A mysterious cluster of sudden deaths among young people who had a genetic syndrome is drawing attention to the high rate of unexplained deaths in individuals with autism and epilepsy.

Individuals with autism use more brainpower in regions linked to visual perception, and less in those related to planning thoughts and actions, compared with healthy controls, according to a multi-study analysis published today in Human Brain Mapping.

A gene that regulates the conversion of testosterone to estrogen in the brain could help explain why males are more susceptible to autism than are females, according to a study published in PLoS One in February.

Accounting for gender increases the power of family-wide studies linking genetic mutations with autism, according to a study published in December in Molecular Psychiatry. The researchers use this approach to identify two candidate genes for the disorder.

Doctors are more likely to miss autism in girls, even when their symptoms are as severe as those of boys, adding to the gender bias that exists in autism.