Linking autism, sex, gender and prenatal hormones
Elevated levels of fetal sex steroid hormones such as testosterone may explain many of autism’s unique features.
Elevated levels of fetal sex steroid hormones such as testosterone may explain many of autism’s unique features.
The little-studied autism gene ANKRD11 helps to package DNA in the nucleus and plays a critical role in the early growth and positioning of neurons.
A brain imaging study of 26 mouse models of autism reveals a broad range of structural abnormalities. The models cluster into groups with similar features, reports a study published 9 September in Molecular Psychiatry.
An autism-linked variant in the receptor for oxytocin may alter connections in the brain, according to a study published 17 May in Neuroimage.
The characteristics, interactions and roles of autism-associated genes in the fruit flies’ brain will help guide how we think about the same genes in humans, says Ralph Greenspan.
Children with autism have less brain matter than normal in a region that synthesizes the social hormones oxytocin and vasopressin, according to a study published 29 April in Biological Psychiatry.
Similarities between us and our closest ape relatives — chimpanzees and bonobos — have shaped our understanding of what it means to be human. The latest surprise is Teco, a young bonobo who shows behaviors that look suspiciously similar to those associated with autism.
The mouse brain has more than 1,300 regions for which the copy from one parent is expressed more often than the one from the other parent, according to two studies published today in Science. These so-called imprinted genes have been proposed to cause some cases of autism, but the researchers say their findings do not support that theory.
Neuroscientists have discovered a population of cells in the smell-perception area of the rat brain that express the hormone vasopressin. The study, published in Nature, begins to unpack the complicated molecular interactions of the hormone in the brain, which could lead to new autism treatments.
The protein that is mutated in Rett syndrome controls the expression of other genes by changing the way DNA packs into a cell, rather than turning genes on or off, according to a study published in Molecular Cell.