Trials of arbaclofen for autism yield mixed results
Autistic children taking the drug showed improvements in some behaviors but not in their social skills.
Autistic children taking the drug showed improvements in some behaviors but not in their social skills.
The drug quells seizures in children with Dravet syndrome or Lennox-Gastaut syndrome.
The catalog could help researchers understand the effects of autism-linked DNA variants that fall outside genes.
The ability to conduct large-scale screening in human neurons could accelerate the discovery of autism treatments.
The investigational drug arbaclofen makes autistic people’s brains respond to a visual task more like non-autistic people’s brains do.
Mice missing the autism-linked gene SHANK3 use more neurons to engage in social behavior than control mice do, reflecting a more disorganized, less efficient brain signaling network.
The investigational drug arbaclofen may right an imbalance between inhibitory and excitatory signaling in the animals’ brains.
Families of children with mutations in a gene called SYNGAP1 have spurred research into the effects of the mutations on people — and how to treat them.
The signaling imbalance theory holds that the brains of autistic people are hyper-excitable because of either excess neuronal activity or weak brakes on that activity.
Looking at the brain as a whole suggests that nudging flawed sets of neurons to collaborate better might alleviate autism traits.