In 2012, 316 children under the age of 6 from low-income households in Kentucky began taking antipsychotic medications. Over the next five years, nearly two-thirds of these preschoolers — 65 percent — wound up taking three or more different types of medications, including antipsychotics, amphetamine…

Some types of restricted and repetitive behaviors become more prevalent among autistic children and teenagers over time, depending on their age and intellectual ability, whereas others decrease, two new studies show. The results lend fresh support to the argument that restricted and repetitive behav…

Hello, and welcome to this week’s Community Newsletter! I’m your host, Chelsey B. Coombs, Spectrum’s engagement editor. Before we get started, I want to let you know about a new Spectrum survey. We are interested in learning how autism researchers are approaching conferences through the end of the y…

Welcome to this month’s edition of the By the Numbers Newsletter. At Spectrum, we do our best to summarize the latest autism research findings — and sometimes the best summary comes in the form of a chart or map. In this newsletter, we boil down interesting new research that is conveyed most succinc…

Severe infections during early childhood are linked to autism — at least in some boys, a new study in mice and people suggests. The findings were published today in Science Advances. Researchers analyzed the health records of millions of children in the United States and found that boys diagnosed wi…

The post Spotted around the web: Shifting sex ratio, autism drugs, neuroscience research inequality appeared first on Spectrum | Autism Research News. Source: Spectrum News

Calling all autism researchers: How are you approaching upcoming conferences and meetings, such as the annual Society for Neuroscience meeting this November, which will be held both virtually and in person? Are you eager to get back to in-person gatherings? Are face-to-face encounters critical to ad…

About 1 in 15 men carries gene-damaging mutations — some with ties to autism or congenital heart disease — only in his sperm, a small study suggests. An advanced DNA-sequencing technique detected the ‘mosaic’ mutations among 25 men in the general population. Mosaic mutations arise after conception a…

The X chromosome holds stronger-than-expected genetic sway over the structure of several brain regions, a new study finds. The X-linked genes that may underlie this oversized influence have ties to autism and intellectual disability. “There were already hints that the X chromosome was likely to be c…

My lifelong fascination with science centers on its potential to improve our lives in practical and meaningful ways. I began my career as a clinical and research psychologist focused on autism more than a generation ago, when autism research was rapidly expanding. It seemed inevitable that basic sci…