From parental age to infection during pregnancy, environmental elements can influence autism risk.
Monkeys exposed in utero to their mother’s immune response to a mock infection show inflammation in their brains four years later. Researchers presented the unpublished work today at the 2014 Society for Neuroscience annual meeting in Washington, D.C.
Children born too soon or too long after their siblings have an increased risk of autism, a new study reports.
Children later diagnosed with autism understand different types of words at 12 months of age than their typically developing peers, according to unpublished research presented Tuesday at the Autism Consortium Research Symposium in Boston.
Mice with an extra copy of the autism-linked gene UBE3A show abnormal social behavior after experiencing recurrent seizures. The findings, presented Tuesday at the Autism Consortium Research Symposium in Boston, provide one possible explanation for why seizures and autism often go hand in hand.
Restricted behaviors in autism represent a genetic link with inattention and hyperactivity in attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, say Tinca Polderman and Henrik Larsson.
Having an infection during pregnancy significantly raises the risk of having a child with autism, finds the largest epidemiological study to date to examine the link.
It’s been 15 years since researchers published an epidemiological study with results so striking they sparked worldwide changes in food fortification. Geneticist Joseph Cubells is revisiting the results to determine whether folate decreases autism risk.
Mice with mutations in the autism-linked gene WDFY3 have enlarged brains reminiscent of those seen in some children with autism, according to a study published 8 September in Nature Communications.
Methyl tags on DNA are distributed differently in postmortem brains from people with autism than in control brains, and mouse pups can inherit altered methylation from their older fathers, report two new studies.
The genetic and environmental factors that underlie difficulties with language differ from those that influence other autism traits, according to a new study of more than 3,000 twin pairs. The study, published 2 August in the American Journal of Medical Genetics Part B: Neuropsychiatric Genetics, suggests that difficulty with language is not a core symptom of autism.
