Autism rates are on the rise in the United States, and especially in California. UC San Diego researchers link changing rates and demographics to increased early-detection.
Researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health contributed to a new Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report that found a continued rise in the overall prevalence of autism among 8-year-olds in 2020, the year the data was collected, as well as notable sex and racial/ethnic trends.
New federal studies coauthored by autism experts at Rutgers found that more children have been diagnosed with autism than at any time since monitoring began more than two decades ago.
According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), about 4 percent of 8-year-old boys and 1 percent of 8-year-old girls, have autism in the U.S. These estimates are the highest since the CDC’s Autism and Developmental Disabilities Monitoring (ADDM) Network was created in 2000.
Researchers have identified two previously unknown genes linked to schizophrenia and newly implicated a third gene as carrying risk for both schizophrenia and autism. Led by the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, the multi-center study further demonstrated that the schizophrenia risk conferred by these rare damaging variants is conserved across ethnicities. The study may also point to new therapeutics. The findings were published in the March 13 online issue of Nature Genetics.
Rutgers research that may eventually enable far earlier autism diagnoses shows that typically developing infants perceive audio-video synchrony better than high-risk for autism infants.
Differences in genes involved in inflammation, immunity response and neural transmissions begin in childhood and evolve across the lifespan in brains of people with autism, a UC Davis MIND Institute has found.
UC Davis researchers have been awarded $1.35 million from the Environmental Protection Agency to study the health impacts of wildfire smoke on pregnant people and children.
Maltreatment during childhood is an especially serious risk factor for health problems in the exposed individual, as it brings a host of lifelong consequences.
Canadian researchers show that in Fragile X syndrome, the most common cause of autism, sensory signals from the outside world are underrepresented by cortical pyramidal neurons in the brain. This phenomenon could provide important clues to the underlying cause of the syndrome's symptoms.
Toddlers’ level of attention to "motherese" speech can be used as a biomarker for autism spectrum disorder (ASD). UC San Diego scientists developed a new eye-tracking test to measure it, which can accurately identify toddlers with a subtype of ASD.
A new study by UC Davis MIND Institute researchers finds that changes in the IQ level of autistic youth may help predict their developmental path as adolescents.
Researchers at the University of Kentucky and Hebrew University in Jerusalem are partnering to study the complexity of the human brain. Specifically, researchers will test whether new, so-far unknown proteins exist in the brain.Labs from the two institutions have obtained a joint grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the United States-Israel Binational Science Foundation (BSF) to study new aspects of RNA biology.
Human brain atlases can be used by medical professionals to track normative trends over time and to pinpoint crucial aspects of early brain development. By using these atlases, they are able to see what typical structural and functional development looks like, making it easier for them to spot the symptoms of abnormal development, such as attention-deficit / hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), dyslexia, and cerebral palsy.
Documented cases of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) in the New York–New Jersey metro region increased by as much as 500 percent between 2000 and 2016, with the highest increase among children without intellectual disabilities, according to a Rutgers study.
Physical health disparity conditions in autistic adults have not been the focus of any research funded by the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) in the last four decades, an analysis of a federal database found.
Adults with high levels of attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) symptoms are more likely to experience anxiety and depression than adults with high levels of autistic traits, according to new research led by psychologists at the University of Bath in the UK.
In the past decade, researchers have begun to appreciate the importance of a two-way communication that occurs between microbes in the gastrointestinal tract and the brain, known as the gut–brain axis.
Investigators have developed a freely available measure of autism symptoms that can help to screen for autism and monitor changes over time in symptoms.
The development of autism may now become easier to understand, thanks to an explanatory model presented in a thesis from University of Gothenburg, Sweden.
Irvine, Calif., Nov. 30, 2022 — Researchers at the University of California, Irvine have discovered that removal of cilia from the brain’s striatum region impaired time perception and judgment, revealing possible new therapeutic targets for mental and neurological conditions including schizophrenia, Parkinson’s and Huntington’s diseases, autism spectrum disorder, and Tourette syndrome.
People with autism have normal pain thresholds but increased sensitivity to painful stimuli, concludes a study in PAIN®, the official publication of the International Association for the Study of Pain (IASP). The journal is published in the Lippincott portfolio by Wolters Kluwer.
Scientists looking to understand the fundamental brain mechanisms of autism spectrum disorder have found that a gene mutation known to be associated with the disorder causes an overstimulation of brain cells far greater than that seen in neuronal cells without the mutation.
The Rutgers-led study, spanning seven years, employed some of the most advanced approaches available in the scientific toolbox, including growing human brain cells from stem cells and transplanting them into mouse brains.
Genetic markers for autism, hiding in plain sight; Recyclable composites help drive net-zero goal; Evaluating buildings in real time; Nanoreactor grows hydrogen-storage crystals
New research findings in mouse models of one genetic risk for autism support the idea that loss of a specific gene interferes with cells in the brain whose role is to inhibit signaling.
University of Oregon neuroscientists discovered a pathway linking microbes in the gut to those in the brain, which could lead to new treatments for neurodevelopmental conditions.
The new study finds brain-wide changes in virtually all of the 11 cortical regions analyzed, regardless of whether they are higher critical association regions – those involved in functions such as reasoning, language, social cognition and mental flexibility – or primary sensory regions.
Shafali Spurling Jeste, MD, shares early findings—and a critical challenge—from the Autism Biomarkers Consortium for Clinical Trials. How do you know if a treatment for autism is effective? That’s a question that has no easy answer—due in large part to the heterogeneous nature of autism spectrum disorder.
Texas Biomed will help map the developing brain with unprecedented detail for the National Institutes of Health’s BRAIN Initiative Cell Atlas Network (BICAN). NIH recently awarded a total of $500 million to 11 teams that will work together to build a 3D brain atlas at single cell resolution over the next five years.
A research group led by Ben-Gurion University of the Negev has proposed a new concept for predicting autism and autistic traits. Empathic disequilibrium combines two types of empathy into a single scale for the first time.
Whatever you do, don’t call them “mini-brains,” say University of Utah Health scientists. Regardless, the seed-sized organoids—which are grown in the lab from human cells—contained an array of neural and other cell types found in the cerebral cortex, the outermost layer of the brain involved in language, emotion, reasoning, and other high-level mental processes. They are providing insights into the brain and uncovering differences that may contribute to autism in some people.
Key differences in male and female mice brains provide new insights into how sex determines the mechanisms by which distinct synapses monitor and regulate dopamine signaling. The impact of sex differences is particularly pronounced when the mice express a human genetic variant found in boys with either ADHD or autism. Behavioral generalizations across the sexes may limit diagnosis of mental illness, especially if one sex translates alterations into outward signs such as hyperactivity and aggression vs. more internal manifestations such as learning, memory and mood, even when the same molecular pathology is at work.
Dr. Daniel Geschwind was awarded the National Academy of Medicine’s top annual prize in mental health in recognition of his pioneering research and leadership in autism genetics.
Can you teach an old drug new tricks? Although drug treatments for the core symptoms of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are not currently available, could an existing drug provide a new treatment, even if it previously had no association with ASD?
The Autism Center of Excellence will lead a global network of research projects studying the interplay of genetics and environmental factors. One aim is to identify modifiable factors to improve lives of people living with autism.
Results of a small, but unique research study, led by researchers from the Seaver Autism Center for Research and Treatment at Mount Sinai and published online in Human Genetics and Genomic Advances, suggest that low-dose ketamine is generally safe, well-tolerated and effective to treat clinical symptoms in children diagnosed with ADNP syndrome (also known as Helsmoortel-VanDerAa syndrome), a rare neurodevelopmental disorder caused by mutations in the activity dependent neuroprotective protein (ADNP) gene.
Irvine, Calif., Sept. 1, 2022 – Anxiety, autism, schizophrenia and Tourette syndrome each have their own distinguishing characteristics, but one factor bridging these and most other mental disorders is circadian rhythm disruption, according to a team of neuroscience, pharmaceutical sciences and computer science researchers at the University of California, Irvine.