Delays in access to autism diagnosis and care are widely acknowledged. These concerns are spurring the medical community to take a hard look at the failings of professional training in contributing to the problem.

The motor problems seen in Rett syndrome may be the result of deficits in a reward pathway in the striatum, according to a study published 12 November in Brain Structure and Function. 

Intelligence quotients of toddlers with autism closely predict how they will fare as adults, reports a 17-year study published 9 December in the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry.

Different combinations of genes located in an autism-linked section of chromosome 22 may modulate various symptoms, such as speech problems, large head size and low muscle tone, researchers reported 17 October in Genetics in Medicine.

Carrying a duplication of the 22q11.2 chromosomal region may protect against schizophrenia, suggests a study published 12 November in Molecular Psychiatry. This is the first evidence of a genetic region that lowers the risk of a disorder rather than increases it.

A large new project aims to link specialized psychiatric units across the U.S. to investigate the causes and best treatment for autism’s most severe and challenging cases.

Mutations in a single gene in 15q11.13 — a chromosomal region linked to multiple neurological disorders — may increase the risk of autism, according a study published in November in Nature Genetics.

Anxiety runs in families with a history of autism, hinting that the two conditions may share a common origin, suggests a twin study published in November.

Deletion and duplication of the 16p11.2 chromosomal region have opposite effects on brain size, but produce similar alterations in the brain’s processing of sound. Researchers reported these and other unpublished findings at the 2013 Society for Neuroscience annual meeting in San Diego, painting a complex picture of the region’s role in autism.

Now that genetic studies have implicated several hundred genes in autism, researchers are turning their attention to where and when in the healthy young brain these genes are expressed. The first two studies to tackle these questions appear today in Cell.