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

There does not appear to be a single genetic or environmental cause of autism, and given the heterogeneity of symptoms, coming up with a clear yes or no test for autism is challenging. Timothy Roberts argues that imaging and electrophysiology are key in the search for autism biomarkers.

The National Institutes of Health is adding a new $1 billion institute for early-stage drug development. But the agency’s plan to fund it by closing the National Center for Research Resources is causing some consternation.

The brains of people with autism show three distinct periods of abnormal development — overgrowth in infancy, prematurely arrested growth in childhood, and shrinking between adolescence and middle age — according to a study in Brain Research.

An analysis of brain scans correctly distinguishes between people with autism and controls more than 90 percent of the time, according to a study published today in Autism Research.

The National Database for Autism Research (NDAR), created by the National Institutes of Health to ease data sharing among autism researchers, has released the first batch of data on more than 10,000 participants enrolled in federally funded autism research studies.

Children with autism have an imbalance of excitation and inhibition in the brain, according to the first study to measure synchrony between brain networks using magnetoencephalography (MEG). The findings were presented Wednesday at the Society for Neuroscience annual meeting in San Diego.

A new brain imaging technique may provide a powerful tool for understanding social interaction, and how it is disrupted in conditions such as autism, according to a poster presented Sunday at the Society for Neuroscience annual meeting in San Diego.

A Pittsburgh group has created a comprehensive database of brain scans and other medical and demographic data from nearly 800 individuals whose brains have been injured by strokes. The researchers showcased the collection, called the Western Pennsylvania Patient Registry, at a poster session yesterday at the Society for Neuroscience annual meeting in San Diego.

Chemicals produced by their mother’s immune system in utero alter the size of several key brain regions in people with schizophrenia, enlarging chambers that store cerebrospinal fluids, and shrinking parts of the cortex involved in processing emotion and memory.