Noticed across the net: Dopamine in autism, predictive expertise, incidental genetic findings | Spectrum
Research summary
- An independent analysis confirmed diagnoses of autism reported by home and caregivers in 251 of 254 participants in SPARK, a large genetic autism study. (SPARK is funded by the Simons Foundation, Spectrum’s parent organization.) Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders
- Children with dup15q syndrome, an autism-related disorder, exhibit altered brain wave activity while they sleep. Spectrum reported preliminary analysis of this data in January. Molecular Autism
- People who learn as adults that they are autistic tend to become more satisfied with their diagnosis over time. Limits in Psychology
- Parents of autistic children can use online platforms to participate in research studies. Journal of Clinical and Translational Science
- Autistic children and adults with high verbal intelligence tend to have low autism trait severity. Autism research
- The brain’s dopamine system is often altered, but not consistent, in people with autism – its signal transmission can either be increased or decreased. Limits in neural circuits
- Parents of autistic children, as well as adults and adolescents in the spectrum, report positive and negative effects of the COVID-19 lockdown: having fewer commitments was good, but seeing fewer friends was bad. Spectrum reported on the effects of the lockdown in a special report on the pandemic last year. autism
- Some people on the spectrum are at lower risk of developing substance use disorder than people with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and non-autistic people – contrary to a trend reported by Spectrum in 2017. European child and adolescent psychiatry
- An automated language analysis called Lexico-Semantic Similarity characterized differences in conversation between autistic and non-autistic children. Limits in Psychology
Science and society
- New data has sparked an old controversy about informing genetic study participants about unrelated mutations or incidental findings: Should people have the right to choose or to opt out? science
- An artificial intelligence-based method of sifting published research data can help identify potential drugs for neurodevelopmental disorders. STAT
- An emerging theory of autism posits that people on the spectrum have impairments in their ability to predict events. Spectrum laid out the basics of predictive coding theory in a 2019 article. Scientific American
- The h-index, once a widely used measure of a researcher’s influence, has lost importance as authoring patterns have changed. Chemistry world
Quote this article: https://doi.org/10.53053/RKPF6076
