I was 30 when my son’s Yeshiva principal called and asked to speak to my husband. When I pressed for details, I was told my 8-year-old was “awkward” and struggling, and that we should pursue testing. An evaluator within our Chassidic community in Brooklyn recommended an autism assessment. Soon after, several of my children received […]
Astrocytes in mouse amygdala encode emotional stateThe glial cells’ activity reliably tracks with freezing, hesitancy and other behaviors reminiscent of anxiety. Astrocytes orchestrate oxytocin’s social effects in miceThe cells amplify oxytocin—and may be responsible for sex differences in social behavior, two preprints find. Astrocytes stabilize circuits in adult mouse brainThe glial cells secrete a protein […]
I was 30 when my son’s Yeshiva principal called and asked to speak to my husband. When I pressed for details, I was told my 8-year-old was “awkward” and struggling, and that we should pursue testing. An evaluator within our Chassidic community in Brooklyn recommended an autism assessment. Soon after, several of my children received […]
I didn’t know I was different from the other kids. I just knew I was trying very, very hard. I had friends. I laughed. I did well in school. From the outside, I looked like a socially capable, high-functioning kid who blended in just fine. But inside, my brain was making constant calculations: Am I […]
This collection of personal experiences attending conferences, authored by Xavier Penn, explores what’s still going wrong in autism research. Content note: Discussion of involuntary psychiatric holds and self-injury Introduction: Oral Sessions I phrase my questions achingly, cautiously, edit after edit, before it’s time to (shakingly) press play. The second evening someone says enthusiastically, “You know, […]
The stringent statistical threshold used in genome-wide association studies (GWAS) hides low-frequency variants linked to autism and other conditions, a new preprint suggests. Lowering the threshold could reveal some of those variants, according to the study. “It’s really innovative,” says Carrie Bearden, professor of psychiatry and biobehavioral sciences at the University of California, Los Angeles, […]
As harmful autism disinformation campaigns go, grievance parents‘ attempt to break off “profound autism” as a separate diagnosis via smearing neurodiversity advocates is notable—mostly for its spitefulness. While we’ve previously analyzed how fact-free and twisted these “profound autism” arguments are, and talked with concerned researchers about how a separate “profound” diagnosis would be a disservice […]
An autistic advocate, podcaster, and author weighs in on the limits of old-school research and services Recently, developmental psychologist Uta Frith shared with Tes Magazine her opinion that the concept of the autism spectrum “has widened to the point of collapse,” and that the diagnostic criteria for autism should be re-assessed. Frith, an emeritus professor […]
A group of 12 scientists, advocates and policymakers has formed its own autism research advisory committee, following the dramatic reshaping of a federal advisory committee earlier this year. The two groups each aim to influence the future of autism research by offering recommendations to federal agencies about which areas to prioritize. And with dueling meetings […]
Seniors research: A news feature in Nature explores autism in older adults, documenting the paucity of research in this area. The article reviews the condition’s links to age-related diagnoses such as heart disease, dementia and Parkinson’s disease, and highlights more recent research on short- and long-term memory, the physical and psychological aspects of menopause, and […]
There is some confusion about what neurodiversity-affirming assessment actually looks like in the real world. Some people worry that affirming care means rubber-stamping whatever someone already thinks, while others worry that differential diagnosis—a systematic process used to identify the most accurate condition(s) (or neurotype) from a set of possible competing conditions (or neurotypes)—inevitably undermines lived […]
Gene fix: In-vivo base editing can mitigate autism-like effects in mice carrying a variant of the CHD3 gene, according to a new paper. The variant, found in people with Snijders Blok-Campeau syndrome, causes altered sociability, cognition and motor coordination in mice. A TadA-embedded adenine base editor, delivered brain-wide via an adeno-associated virus, restored CHD3 protein […]
