Sex bias: This week, new preprints highlight the influence of sex on the occurrence of de novo variants in autism and on the specific neural pathways that show altered connectivity in the condition. Sex bias also showed up in another study, which found that prenatal exposure to COVID-19 infection is associated with an increased likelihood […]
Adolescent girls and boys are diagnosed with autism at nearly equal rates even though, earlier in childhood, boys are about three times as likely to receive this diagnosis, according to a new study. The results add to mounting evidence that autistic girls tend to be diagnosed later in life than autistic boys. This disparity could […]
Male and female human fetuses show distinct patterns of gene activity and DNA regulation in the cerebral cortex, according to a new analysis of thousands of individual brain cells. The study offers one of the most detailed maps to date of how such activity differs between boys and girls’ brains during the second trimester. It […]
Low-quality scans introduce systematic bias into large-scale neuroimaging analyses, according to a new study. The findings challenge the widely held assumption that larger sample sizes in neuroimaging studies yield more robust results that can counteract the presence of noisy images, says Joshua Roffman, associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and principal investigator of […]
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 […]
Imbalanced Characteristics: Animals with mutated ADNP have motor difficulties that are more pronounced in female mice. Photography by Rick Dahms Mice with a mutation in an autism-related gene called ADNP show gender-specific changes in gene expression, behavior, and other traits, a new study shows. The mice can mimic some of the traits seen in humans […]
