Autism is popularly viewed as a disorder of childhood, not old age, but that doesn’t mean senior citizens are unaffected.

Children with autism do not use efficient, systematic methods to search for an object, according to a study published in January in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Children with autism understand fewer words than their verbal ability would suggest, according to a study published in December in the International Journal of Language and Communication Disorders.

High levels of serotonin in the womb may up the risk of autism in the child, according to a study published in December in the American Journal of Medical Genetics.

Mice exposed to an epilepsy drug show several features of autism, including abnormal social interactions, repetitive behaviors and patterns of super-fast brain waves, called gamma oscillations, according to a study published 15 December in Biological Psychiatry.

As autism rates rise, so do health care costs for the disorder. Despite federal programs, some children with autism are falling through the cracks in the health care system.

Accounting for gender increases the power of family-wide studies linking genetic mutations with autism, according to a study published in December in Molecular Psychiatry. The researchers use this approach to identify two candidate genes for the disorder.

At birth, children with autism have lower blood levels of a class of antibody produced in response to infection compared with healthy controls, according to a report published in December in Autism Research.

People with autism tend to use more expressive language than controls do when asked to describe the movement of geometric shapes. But their descriptions are inaccurate.

A new drug appears to relieve symptoms of fragile X syndrome by blocking the over-production of a key protein in a subset of people with the disorder, according to a 6 January study in Science Translational Medicine.