Making friends at school can be hard for any kid, but it comes especially hard to children with autism. One approach to helping students with autism in mainstream classrooms is to train their classmates in how to engage with them.

Growing up bilingual doesn’t impair language skills in children with autism, according to two studies in the Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders.

Methylation marks were thought to be permanent features of the genome, but a new study challenges that idea.

Memory is a notoriously unreliable guide, and this is especially true when strong emotions are involved. So it’s not surprising that parents of children with autism tend to recall the exact onset of their child’s symptoms with something less than accuracy.

Breaking down the learning of new concepts into small steps may help people with autism retain new skills.

Deletions on a segment of chromosome 11 are associated with autism, attention problems and obesity, according to a study published in the June issue of the American Journal of Medical Genetics Part A.

Children with autism who have older siblings score lower on tests that assess their understanding of the thoughts, feelings and intentions of others, compared with those who don’t have older siblings.

Diagnosing autism in children is difficult enough, but detecting the disorder in adults is even more complicated.

Copy number variations, or CNVs — duplications or deletions of DNA segments — can influence the expression of unrelated genes on the same chromosome, according to a study published in November in PLOS Biology.

Mice bearing the genetic defect that causes Timothy syndrome show many autism-like behaviors, and may also have enhanced cognitive abilities like those seen in a small number of people with autism, suggests a poster presented Sunday at the Society for Neuroscience annual meeting in San Diego.