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"The findings demonstrate that, contrary to what has been thought, the apparent lack of interpersonal interest among people with autism is not due to a lack of concern," says Nouchine Hadjikhani, MD, PhD, director of neurolimbic research in the Martinos Center and corresponding author of the new study. "Rather, our results show that this behavior is a way to decrease an unpleasant excessive arousal stemming from overactivation in a particular part of the brain." The key to this research lies in the brain's subcortical system, which is responsible for the natural orientation toward faces seen in newborns and is important later for emotion perception. The subcortical system can be specifically activated by eye contact, and previous work by Hadjikhani and colleagues revealed that, among those with autism, it was oversensitive to effects elicited by direct gaze and emotional expression. In the present study, she took that observation further, asking what happ...

A review of more than 150 papers on ASD and gut bacteria found that since the 1960s, scientists have been reporting links between the composition of bacteria in the gut and autistic behaviour. The review highlights many studies showing that restoring a healthy balance in gut bacteria can treat ASD symptoms. "To date there are no effective therapies to treat this range of brain developmental disorders," explains Dr Qinrui Li of Peking University, China. "The number of people being diagnosed with ASD is on the rise. As well as being an expensive condition to manage, ASD has a huge emotional and social cost on families of sufferers." The link between the gut and ASD is well-known among sufferers: problems like diarrhea, constipation and flatulence are commonly reported. The root of gastro-intestinal problems like these is an imbalance of "good" and "bad" bacteria in the gut. A cheap and effective treatment? Many of the papers reviewed su...

While previous research has shown that children of older fathers are at a higher risk of some adverse outcomes, including autism and schizophrenia, this new study published in  Translational Psychiatry  suggests that children of older fathers may also have certain advantages over their peers in educational and career settings. The researchers from King's College London and The Seaver Autism Center for Research and Treatment at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in the United States collected behavioural and cognitive data from 15,000 UK-based twin pairs in the Twins Early Development Study (TEDS). When the twins were 12 years old, they completed online tests that measured 'geek-like' traits, including non-verbal IQ, strong focus on the subject of interest and levels of social aloofness. Parents were also asked whether their child cares about how they are perceived by their peers and if they have any interests that take up substantial majority of their time....

"Our study is the tip of the iceberg in understanding the complex biological mechanisms underlying this disorder. With recent advancements in genetic research, we are at the cusp of identifying many genes involved in Tourette syndrome," said Jeremiah Scharf, M.D., Ph.D., assistant professor of neurology and psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, and co-corresponding author of the study. The research was part of an international collaboration co-led by Dr. Scharf; Giovanni Coppola, M.D., professor of psychiatry and neurology at the University of California, Los Angeles; Carol Mathews, M.D., professor of psychiatry at the University of Florida in Gainesville; and Peristera Paschou, Ph.D., associate professor in the department of biological sciences at Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana. The scientific team conducted genetic analyses on 2,434 individuals with Tourette syndrome and compared them to 4,093 controls, focusing ...