About 15 years ago, Ashura Buckley made an observation that intrigued her. She was monitoring the overnight brain activity of children with autism or developmental delay using electroencephalography (EEG) and noticed that their brain wave patterns were strikingly different from those of their neurotypical peers. Specifically, in their recordings, the patterns that mark different stages […]
Autism comes with a stereotype: shy, awkward, obsessed with tech, decidedly male. It’s an image that erases the many girls and women who are autistic, but it also reflects the reality that far more boys than girls have a diagnosis. Several studies put that sex ratio at about 3 to 1; among psychiatric conditions, only […]
Illustration by Laurène Boglio Welcome to this month’s edition of the By the Numbers newsletter. At Spectrum, we do our best to summarize the latest in autism research. Sometimes the best summary is a chart or map. In this newsletter we put interesting new research results in a nutshell, which are conveyed most concisely through […]
Autism research has long focused on genes involved in the formation of neurons and the function of synapses. Mutations in these genes were the first to be firmly linked to the disease and its characteristics. Over the past decade, however, several studies have implicated a second class of genes: those involved in remodeling chromatin – […]
