A single dose of a drug used to treat African sleeping sickness temporarily improves symptoms of autism in a mouse model, according to a study published last week in Translational Psychiatry.
The severity of core autism symptoms in young children goes hand in hand with the degree of the children’s difficulty with motor tasks.
There are no available medications for treating autism’s core symptoms, but there are several candidates in clinical trials. Jeremy Veenstra-VanderWeele describes the factors researchers must take into account when developing drugs for the disorder.
Two new rat models of autism don’t roughhouse like normal rats do, and show some compulsive behaviors, according to a study published in April in Behavioral Neuroscience. The models underscore the advantage rats have over mice in modeling complex social behaviors.
Inducing seizures in young mice leads to autism-like social behavior, as well as problems with learning and memory, according to a paper published 29 March in Experimental Neurology.
A teenage girl with Rett syndrome has a mutation in WFR45, a gene that is mutated in people who abruptly lose motor and mental skills in adulthood, according to a study published 13 March in the Journal of Human Genetics.
Many of the children with autism known to have outgrown their diagnosis received intense behavioral therapy for long periods of time during childhood, reports a study published in May in the Journal of Developmental and Behavioral Pediatrics.
Researchers have linked defects in the dopamine brain circuit to behaviors of a new mouse model of the 16p11.2 deletion. In a study in the 16 May Cell Reports, they suggest that the mutation alters the brain’s regulation of dopamine and may be responsible for behavioral problems, including autism.
Risperidone, the first drug approved for children with autism and the most widely used, improves some children’s behavior but can have severe side effects, suggests an informal analysis of the drug’s use.
Injecting antibodies taken from mothers of children with autism directly into the brains of fetal mice results in autism-like behaviors in the mice in adulthood, according to a study published 5 March in Behavioural Brain Research.