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.

Hallmarks of autism are characteristic behaviors - repetitive motions, problems interacting with others, impaired communication abilities - that occur in widely different combinations and degrees of severity among those who have the condition.

Mice containing a mutated human gene implicated in autism exhibit the poor social skills but increased intelligence akin to the title character’s traits in the movie “Rain Man,” researchers at UT Southwestern Medical Center have found.

In the first study of its kind, researchers have discovered that in autistic individuals, connections between brain cells may be deficient within single regions, and not just between regions, as was previously believed.

A new model for understanding how autism is acquired has been developed by a team of researchers led by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) and Albert Einstein College of Medicine.

In a study published today in the Archives of General Psychiatry, researchers from the Kennedy Krieger Institute in Baltimore, Maryland found that autism can be diagnosed at close to one year of age, which is the earliest the disorder has ever been diagnosed. The study, which evaluated social and communication development in autism spectrum disorders (ASD) from 14 to 36 months of age, revealed that approximately half of all children with autism can be diagnosed around the first birthday.

To understand the meaning of a conversation, kids automatically do what adults do —besides processing the meaning of words, they unconsciously "read" the expression on a person's face and listen to their tone of voice, then integrate that information with the context at hand to discern meaning, be it humor, anger, irony or straightforwardness.

Next time you lose your car keys and enlist the family to help you search, try a little experiment. After your spouse searches an area, go and look in the same place. It will likely feel strange, even irritating to both of you - and that’s because you may be fighting an ancient, hard-wired, human behaviour pattern.

Using an innovative statistical approach, a research team from Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis and the University of California, Los Angeles, has identified two regions of DNA linked to autism. They found the suspicious DNA with a much smaller sample of people than has been used traditionally in searches for autism genes.

When we have a conversation with someone, we not only hear what they say, we see what they say. Eyes can smolder or twinkle. Gazes can be direct or shifty. "Reading" these facial expressions gives context and meaning to the words we hear. In a report to be presented May 5 at the International Meeting for Autism Research in Seatlle, researchers from UCLA will show that children with autism can't do this.