Emerging genetic research may help scientists recognize children with autism at a younger and potentially treatable age, according to an editorial in the April issue of Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine, one of the JAMA/Archives journals.
Children with autism do not receive the same quality of primary care as children with other special health care needs, according to research from the University of Minnesota Medical School.
Autism is a common neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by severely impaired social, communicative, and behavioral functions. It is thought that genetic make-up predisposes an individual to autism, and several genes have been associated with the development of autism.
Autism is thought to be the most highly heritable of all neuro-psychiatric disorders. Yet, most cases of this childhood developmental disorder that severely affects social interaction and communication are “sporadic” and come with no family history.
DNA ‘glitches’ – tiny gene mutations pose more risk for autism than had been previously thought.
Tiny gene mutations, each individually rare, pose more risk for autism than had been previously thought, suggests a study funded in part by the National Institute of Mental Health, a component of the National Institutes of Health.
Researchers at the Yale School of Medicine Child Study Center and 10 other institutions will share a $10 million gift from James and Marilyn Simons of The Simons Foundation to create a databank of DNA samples from autism patients around the country.
Using advanced brain imaging techniques, researchers at Georgetown University Medical Center have watched how humans use both lower and higher brain processes to learn novel tasks, an advance they say may help speed up the teaching of new skills as well as offer strategies to retrain people with perceptual deficits due to autism.
On Feb. 18, Nature Genetics published the largest-ever study on the genetics of autism. The research is the fruit of an international autism genetics consortium, called the Autism Genome Project.
Yale School of Medicine autism experts Fred R. Volkmar, M.D., and Ami Klin are part of a global research consortium from 19 countries that identified an individual gene and a region of a chromosome that may lead to autism in children.