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It Takes Brains to Solve Autism
The Simons Foundation, Autism Speaks, the MIND Institute and the Autism Science Foundation have announced the launch of the Autism BrainNet, and encourage individuals with autism and their families to register to become tissue donors at www.autismbrainnet.org. Autism BrainNet is a consortium...
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Autism Science Foundation Announces 2014 Grant Recipients
The Autism Science Foundation, a not-for-profit organization dedicated to funding autism research, has announced the recipients of its 2014 annual pre and post-doctoral fellowships as well as the recipients of its first undergraduate summer research grants. Pre and Postdoctoral Research...
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NIH Study Finds Attention to Others’ Eyes Declines in 2 to 6-Month-Old Infants Later Diagnosed with Autism
Eye contact during early infancy may be a key to early identification of autism, according to a study funded by the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), part of the National Institutes of Health. Published this week in the journal Nature, the study reveals the earliest sign of developing...
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Studies Map Gene Expression Across Brain Development
Now that genetic studies have implicated several hundred genes in autism, researchers are turning their attention to where and when in the healthy young brain these genes are expressed. The first two studies to tackle these questions appeared on November 21, 2013 in Cell. One report, led by...
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Autism Science Foundation Announces 2013 Research Enhancement Grant Recipients
On November 12, 2013, the Autism Science Foundation, a not-for-profit organization dedicated to funding autism research, announced the recipients of research enhancement mini grants. These grants are intended to enable researchers to expand the scope or increase the efficiency of existing grants,...
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Mount Sinai Researchers Receive NIH Grant to Study Promising Treatment for Autism Subtype
Scientists at the Seaver Autism Center at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai have received a grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to study Insulin-Like Growth Factor-1 (IGF-1), a promising treatment for a subtype of autism called Phelan McDermid Syndrome (PMS). The grant...
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Study Finds That Autism Genes are Surprisingly Large
Enzymes called topoisomerases are crucial for the expression of extremely long genes in neurons, according to a study published 5 September in Nature1. More than one-quarter of these genes are known autism candidates, the study found. In the process of doing these analyses, the researchers...
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Robots as Co-Therapists in Behavior Therapy for Individuals with ASD
Recent technological advances have opened the possibility of using robots in therapy for individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). This approach has received a lot of press, but to date most research has focused on developing the robots rather than clinical issues related to the use of...
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Finding and Evaluating Empirically-Based Interventions
Parents are often overwhelmed with a mountain of information regarding treatments for various symptoms of autism spectrum disorders or their co-morbid disorders. Some publications claim to reverse or even cure autism. Some of these publications and advertisements are well written, logical, based...
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A Review of a Randomized Control Trial of DIR/Floortime Therapy
Parents and clinicians frequently face the issue of making informed decisions amongst heated debates over the most effective approaches for treating young children with autism (Prizant and Wetherby, 1998). Of the current approaches used to treat autism, there lies a continuum ranging from intensive...
