An innovative academic program in New York City public schools is successfully educating children with high-functioning autism alongside their unaffected peers.

Parents see more benefits to a diagnosis of autism than their affected children do — perhaps unsurprising, given young people’s overwhelming desire to fit in with their peers.

Harmful mutations in a gene that regulates the chemical environment outside of neurons are associated with both autism and epilepsy, according to a study published 31 March in Neurobiology of Disease.

Individuals with autism have multiple mutations in a pathway that functions in the mitochondria, the energy center of the cell, according to a study published 27 April in the European Journal of Human Genetics. They also have higher-than-average numbers of variants in pathways involved in metabolism, gene expression and the regulation of cell division.

Autism is diagnosed based on the severity and variety of its symptoms. This makes it very difficult to diagnose and easy to confuse with other disorders, such as language delay and intellectual disability, cautions Isabelle Rapin.

Genetic screening of children with autism is critical to designing more effective interventions and treatment, says a pediatrician.

Individuals with intellectual disability are more likely than controls to have harmful mutations in autism candidate genes, according to a study published 11 March in the American Journal of Human Genetics.

Teenage boys with Asperger syndrome with higher-than-average scores on tests of abstract reasoning fare worse than controls on short-term memory and ability to filter out distractions.

Long bundles of neurons that connect key regions in the brain develop abnormally in the first year of life in children with autism, according to new findings presented Friday at the International Meeting for Autism Research in San Diego.

A new analysis of children with autism and their unaffected parents provides the best evidence to date that mutations in multiple genes may work together to cause autism and related disorders.