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Scientists Want to Know Your Opinions About Participating in Research
Poor or slow recruitment into research studies has a negative impact on research discoveries and shorten patient lives. There are lost opportunities for new discoveries, and evidence-based resources and services are delayed. Funding organizations and researchers need to come up with creative...
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Using Gene Editing, Neuroscientists Develop a New Model for Autism
By introducing a gene variant associated with autism into monkeys, researchers hope to use the model to study treatment options for severe neurodevelopmental disorders. Using the genome-editing system CRISPR, researchers at MIT and in China have engineered macaque monkeys to express a gene...
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Communication in Brain May Be Remarkably Constant in Autism
Communication in brain activity in people with autism are unusually consistent over seconds — and even years, two new studies suggest.1,2 One study shows that patterns of connectivity remain stable in autistic adolescents, whereas they tend to change and specialize in controls. The other study...
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New Biomarker Panel Could Accelerate Autism Diagnoses
About 17 percent of kids with autism identified with metabolic blood test Investigators at the UC Davis MIND Institute and NeuroPointDX, a division of Stemina Biomarker Discovery, have identified a group of blood metabolites that could help detect some children with autism spectrum disorder...
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Reducing Disparities in Early Identification of ASD
Early identification of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) expedites access to appropriate intervention and leads to improved functional outcomes (Dawson et al., 2010). Yet, despite concerns of possible ASD often noted by 18 months, the median age of diagnosis in the United States continues to hover...
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Inherited Variations in Noncoding Sections of DNA Associated with Autism
A new study has identified an association between paternally-inherited rare structural variants in noncoding segments of genes and the development of autism spectrum disorder (ASD). The study, funded in part by the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) and published in Science, adds to a...
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Suspect Molecules Overlap in Autism, Schizophrenia and Bipolar Disorder
Most medical disorders have well-defined physical characteristics seen in tissues, organs and bodily fluids. Psychiatric disorders, in contrast, are not defined by such pathology, but rather by behavior. A UCLA-led study, published in Science, has found that autism, schizophrenia and bipolar...
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What Kind of Research Can Guide the Growth of ASD Services?
Most of my 25-year career in ASD has centered on providing services. Throughout that time, I have tried to draw straight lines from research findings to practice, and show how science benefits children with ASD. On the way, I learned is that not all research is equally relevant to service...
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Autism Science Foundation Announces Expansion of the Autism Sisters Project – 3 New Grants Awarded to Search for the Female Protective Effect
The Autism Science Foundation (ASF), a not-for-profit organization dedicated to catalyzing innovative autism research, announced the launch of three new multi-year research grants to expand the Autism Sisters Project at the University of California at San Francisco (UCSF) and the Broad Institute in...
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Parental Age Ups Rate of New Mutations Passed to Children
Men and women both transmit an increasing number of new mutations to their children as they age, according to a study published recently in Nature (Jónsson H. et al., 2017). The finding is based on an analysis of whole genomes from nearly 5,000 people. The increase in these ‘de novo’ mutations...
