The University of Leicester is leading on a national study to calculate the number of adults with autism, it has been announced today.

Parents of children with autism are increasingly turning to sensory integration treatment to help their children deal with the disorder, and they’re seeing good results. In 2007, 71 percent of parents who pursued alternatives to traditional treatment used sensory integration methods, and 91 percent found these methods helpful.

Many children with autism have elevated blood levels of serotonin – a chemical with strong links to mood and anxiety. But what relevance this “hyperserotonemia” has for autism has remained a mystery.

New research from the UC Davis M.I.N.D. Institute shows that an interaction between fetal brain cells and maternal antibodies could be linked with the repetitive behavior — also called stereotypies — that is characteristic of autism.

Contrary to popular notions, people at the high end of the autism spectrum disorder continuum suffer most from an inability to model “self” rather than impaired ability to respond to others, said Baylor College of Medicine researchers in a report that appear in the journal Neuron.

Researchers have pinpointed subtle deficits in the brains of people with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) that they say could aid more precise diagnoses and perhaps improve treatment of ASD. The researchers discovered characteristic patterns of brain activity in people with ASD that reflect an inability to perceive themselves as social creatures.

There is no evidence for a link between the MMR (measles, mumps, rubella) jab and autism, finds research published ahead of print in the Archives of Disease in Childhood .

Today’s issue of the American Journal of Human Genetics (AJHG), describes what might be a corner piece of the autism puzzle—the identification and subsequent validation of a gene linked to the development of autism by three separate groups of scientists.

Autism researchers at the University of Washington will take the initial step in attempting to prevent the developmental disorder when they launch an $11.3 million study this week.

Using a novel imaging technique to study autistic children, researchers have found increased gray matter in the brain areas that govern social processing and learning by observation.

Researchers at Johns Hopkins’ McKusick-Nathans Institute of Genetic Medicine today are releasing newly generated genetic data to help speed autism research. The Hopkins data, coordinated with a similar data release from the Autism Consortium, aims to help uncover the underlying hereditary factors and speed the understanding of autism by encouraging scientific collaboration.

The Autism Consortium, a group of researchers, clinicians and families dedicated to radically accelerating research and enhancing clinical care for autism, announced today that it has completed the first genome scan for Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) through its Autism Gene Discovery Project and has released the reference data set to a database that autism researchers around the world can use.