Historians and authors have given many famous figures an armchair diagnosis of autism over the years: Albert Einstein, Michelangelo and Thomas Jefferson, to name just a few. Looking for signs of autism in historical figures and fictional characters can give us important insight into society’s changi…

Minimally verbal autistic people do not differentiate the sound of their own name from that of a stranger’s, according to a new electroencephalography (EEG) study1. They also have difficulties filtering sounds from background noise. And among minimally verbal autistic people, those with weaker neura…

Gender, like autism, exists on a spectrum. In the 1990s, as growing numbers of children sought care related to their gender identity, clinicians and researchers began to notice a trend: An unexpected number of these children were autistic or had autism traits. The observation has spurred researchers…

Autistic men show a greater imbalance between excitatory and inhibitory signaling in the medial prefrontal cortex than autistic women do, a new study has found1. The sex difference in this brain area, which is involved in social behavior and cognition, could help explain why autistic women seem to c…

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Those in the medical field struggle to screen and diagnose autism. Our standardized screening tests are not perfect: They often erroneously flag children who turn out not to have autism and miss many of those who do. What’s more, there are far too few autism specialists to evaluate all those suspect…

People who do not identify with the sex they were assigned at birth are three to six times as likely to be autistic as cisgender people are, according to the largest study yet to examine the connection1. Gender-diverse people are also more likely to report autism traits and to suspect they have undi…

Many problems associated with fragile X syndrome stem from a leak in mitochondria, organelles that act as the power stations of the cell, a new study suggests1. Stopping this leak eases some of the autism-like traits of mice that model the syndrome. “The paper is very solid,” says John Jay Gargus, d…

Lowered expression of a gene called DDHD2 may increase a person’s likelihood of autism, according to a new analysis1. The researchers arrived at this conclusion via a genome-wide association study (GWAS), an approach used to identify common variants — in the form of single-letter changes to DNA that…

A new viral tool can selectively control different types of neurons that dampen brain activity in rodents, monkeys and people1. The ability to manipulate inhibitory cells in such a targeted way may help scientists test these cells’ contributions to conditions such as epilepsy and autism. The techniq…