From funding decisions to scientific fraud, a wide range of societal factors shape autism research.
The Psychiatric GWAS Consortium has released its first batch of analyses, identifying several significant common variations associated with schizophrenia. The results were presented Sunday at the World Congress of Psychiatric Genetics in San Diego.
Variations linked to autism and schizophrenia crop up in people with a large variety of conditions, including bipolar disorder, seizures and obsessive-compulsive disorder, as well as in healthy people. This notion gained new support from unpublished data presented at the World Congress for Psychiatric Genetics in San Diego.
A new mutation in the neuroligin-4 (NLGN4) gene, one of the few genes convincingly tied to autism, has been found in two brothers with autism, further implicating the gene in the disorder, scientists reported in the Journal of Neuroscience.
A newer version of the psychiatric manual may expand the definition of autism, folding in Asperger syndrome and pervasive developmental disorder not otherwise specified.
The brains of people with autism show high levels of inflammation compared with controls, suggests a study of postmortem brain tissue from 11 individuals with autism, presented at a poster session Monday at the Society for Neuroscience meeting in Chicago.
On Saturday, a top government official resigned from the Interagency Autism Coordination Committee, the body of scientists and advocates that’s responsible for guiding all autism research funded by the U.S. National Institutes of Health. Institute director Francis Collins responds.
National Institutes of Health director Francis Collins talks about the agency’s upcoming plans for “beefing up” autism research, including more than $100 million each year in grants for the field.
Some of the most profound mysteries of human nature relate to how we communicate and interact with each other. Matthew Belmonte, assistant professor of human development at Cornell University, talks about how studying people with autism can help understand these aspects in healthy people.
It’s that time of year again — fall foliage, plump pumpkins and, if you’re a neuroscientist, the mad, mobbed scenes at the Society for Neuroscience (SFN) annual meeting.
A team of British researchers has garnered some of the first genetic evidence supporting their theory that sex hormones play a role in the development of autism.
