Last week, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) announced 13 recipients of grants from the Autism Data Science Initiative (ADSI), a $50 million effort to tap existing datasets to study factors that contribute to autism. The bulk of the projects plan to examine how environmental factors affect people with different genetic backgrounds. […]
Just four months after the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) announced a new $50 million data science program for autism research, the agency has revealed the projects it will fund. The list of the Autism Data Science Initiative’s (ADSI) 13 projects, which was posted online last week, comprises “talented scientists doing cutting-edge work,” Brian […]
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 […]
When COVID-19 shut down labs worldwide, Jordan Farrell, then a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford University, faced a dilemma. His work on the distinct roles of dentate spikes and sharp wave ripples in the hippocampus demanded extensive neural recordings from multiple brain regions simultaneously—a daunting experimental setup in the best of times and nearly impossible during […]
Frail rules: Most autism research journals do not mandate that researchers include racial or ethnic data on participants. FatCamera/Getty Images Just one-quarter of autism intervention studies provide data on the race and ethnicity of participants, according to a new study. The analysis, published in Autism in January, focused on educational or behavioral interventions given in […]
Jana von Hehn Senior director of research and clinical strategyRett Syndrome Research Trust Rett syndrome affects about 1 in 10,000 female babies, for whom there are no approved medications. (The condition rarely affects boys.) Clinical trials of drugs to treat the condition’s core features — which include motor, eating and breathing problems, and autism — […]
The number of fighting behavior recommendations at three of Madison’s four main high schools rose sharply this September compared to the same month two years earlier, when the school year last began in-person classes. Forty-nine referrals were made for the fight in September 2021, compared to 28 for the same month in 2019. September 2021 […]
The number of fighting behavior recommendations at three of Madison’s four main high schools rose sharply this September compared to the same month two years earlier, when the school year last began in-person classes. Forty-nine referrals were made for the fight in September 2021, compared to 28 for the same month in 2019. September 2021 […]
Data breach: Upon release, researchers discovered flaws that undermined their conclusions about autism, sleep, and vitamin A. Emilija Manevska / Getty Images A study linking low vitamin A levels to sleep disorders in autistic children was withdrawn this month after the authors discovered “fundamental errors” in their data. The study, published July 3 in BMC […]
The rate of autism diagnoses in the US continues to rise. Thanks in part to better awareness and changes in diagnostic criteria, the estimated number of children diagnosed with autism in the United States rose from 1 in 150 in the early 2000s to 1 in 54 in 2016. Now, new numbers are from the […]
PLOS Data: According to the guidelines of the PLOS journals, researchers must make all data necessary to replicate their study results publicly available upon publication. Last month, PLOS ONE magazine added an editorial “word of concern” to a study of brain imaging of autism published seven years ago after a dispute over access to the […]
