Clinicians should place children under age 5 who have developmental delay into a broad diagnostic category, called ESSENCE, which may then resolve into any number of individual diagnoses over time, says Christopher Gillberg.
Age-based cutoff scores for BISCUIT, an early diagnostic tool for children with autism traits, help clinicians accurately identify children who also have other disorders, says Johnny Matson.
Neurons derived from individuals who carry extra copies of an autism-linked chromosomal region have gene expression patterns that are unexpectedly similar to those of neurons with deletions of the region. The unpublished findings were presented Thursday at the Dup15q Alliance Scientific Meeting in Sacramento, California.
The most popular drugs prescribed for autism in some countries often have serious side effects or have not been vetted in robust clinical trials, finds a study published 5 September in Psychopharmacology.
Many children with autism have problems with sleep, which can worsen symptoms of the disorder. A better understanding of sleep in autism may help reveal the mechanisms of autism and point to potential treatments, say Ruth O’Hara and Michelle Primeau.
Ritalin lowers impulsivity, oppositional behavior and attention deficit in children with autism and has mild side effects, reports a study published 19 June in the Journal of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry.
U.K. doctors prescribe fewer medications for autism than doctors in the U.S., perhaps due to tighter drug laws and a more conservative medical culture, suggests a new study, published 17 May in Psychopharmacology.
RORA, an autism candidate gene, encodes a protein that binds more than 2,500 other genes and alters the expression of some of those genes, according to a study published 22 May in Molecular Autism.
The brainstems of children with autism are smaller than average, but reach sizes similar to those of controls by age 15, according to a two-year imaging study published 22 April in Behavioral Brain Research.
Children with autism are more likely to attempt suicide than their typical peers are, particularly if they are depressed or living in low-income families, says a January study in Research in Autism Spectrum Disorders.