Top Research Papers on Autism

Performance of the M-CHAT can be improved in real-world health care settings by administering screens with fidelity and facilitating timely ASD evaluations for screen-positive children.

Overall, microbiome differences in ASD may reflect dietary preferences that relate to diagnostic features, and it is cautioned against claims that the microbiome has a driving role in ASD.

A new autism screening system that replaces the conventional scoring functions in classic screening methods with deep learning algorithms and revealed higher accuracy, sensitivity, and specificity when compared with conventional screening methods is proposed.

The findings suggest that the autism acceptance training program in this study, designed to increase autism knowledge and familiarity among non-autistic people, holds promise for reducing explicit but not implicit biases toward autism.

Emotional intelligence is a term, which includes various abilities and skills, which enable a person to perceive and handle emotional situations both his own and those of other individuals with the aim of his social and personal development. More specifically, the first part of this work presents an analysis of the role of emotional intelligence in the individual. Then, the 8 pillars of metcognition are mentioned, the role of humor in EI, taking distances with the help of EI, the correlation with hormones, the mindfulness model, the new layered model on EI, and the EI in gifted individual. In ...

Evidence for the presence, quality, and correlates of interpersonal synchrony in autism spectrum disorder (ASD) across four domains are reviewed, including motor, conversational, physiological, and neural.

This Primer by Lord and colleagues reviews the epidemiology, mechanisms, clinical detection and treatment of autism and identifies the long-term needs of people with autism.

Emerging data-driven efforts to delineate more homogeneous ASD subgroups at the level of brain structure and function-that is, neurosubtyping are summarized, breaking this pursuit into key methodological steps: the selection of diagnostic samples, neuroimaging features, algorithms, and validation approaches.

It is important to consider the child with autism as a whole and not overlook possible symptoms as part of autism, and the physician should rule out the presence of a medical condition before moving on to other interventions or therapies.

Some of the key findings that are shaping current understanding of autism and what these discoveries mean for clinicians are considered.

Evidence from human studies and mouse models that cortical interneurons are involved in the pathophysiology of autism and that parvalbumin cell hypofunction may be a primary driver of circuit dysfunction in autism are discussed.

Evidence on the diagnosis and treatment of ASD is summarized and common early signs and symptoms of ASD in a child's first 2 years of life include no response to name when called, no or limited use of gestures in communication, and lack of imaginative play.

There are many different perspectives for understanding autism. These perspectives may each convey different levels of stigma for autistic individuals. This qualitative study aimed to understand how autistic individuals make sense of their own autism and experience the stigma attached to autism. The study used critical grounded theory tools. Participants (N = 20) discussed autism as central to their identity, and integral to who they are. While participants thought of autism as value neutral, they expressed how society confers negative meanings onto autism, and thus, them. The findings also in...

Sufficient replicated evidence is available to implicate non-coding RNA, aberrant epigenetic profiles, GABAergic, glutamatergic and glial dysfunction in autism pathogenesis and the cerebellum and frontal cortex are most consistently implicated.

Some applications of artificial intelligence that are used already or are in a preliminary phase aiming to highlight the use of smart technology in the diagnosing process of autism are presented.

The past three decades have seen a major shift in our understanding of the strong links between autism and identity. These developments have called for careful consideration of the language used to describe autism. Here, we briefly discuss some of these deliberations and provide guidance to researchers around language use in autism research.

Some autistic people employ strategies and behaviours to cope with the everyday social world, thereby 'camouflaging' their autistic differences and difficulties. This review aimed to systematically appraise and synthesise the current evidence base pertaining to autistic camouflaging. Following a systematic search of eight databases, 29 studies quantifying camouflaging in children and adults with autism diagnoses or high levels of autistic traits were reviewed. The multiple methods used to measure camouflaging broadly fell under two different approaches: internal-external discrepancy or self-re...

The history of Autism is a discourse (Waltz 2013), a journey through a disputed landscape, whose territories are alternatively staked by Politics, Education, Society, and Culture. It is diachronic in nature, as the knowledge of the present is built upon the past, but a diachronic that has progressed differently in different states, at different rates as each impact upon each other. Essentially its origins are lost in myth (Frith 1992) but its presence has always been felt in one way or another, even before the concept of autism was framed in the Western psychiatric narrative.

The language used to refer to autism has been a topic of ongoing debate. Research in English-speaking countries indicated an overall preference for identity-first language (‘autistic person’) among autistic adults rather than person-first language (‘person with autism’). We examined terminology preference in Dutch autistic adults ( n = 1026; 16–84 years; 57% women) and parents of autistic children ( n = 286) via an online survey. A majority of self-reporting adults with autism (68.3%) and parents (82.5%) demonstrated a person-first language preference. A younger age, higher IQ and more autisti...

It was found that higher autism polygenic scores (PGS) were associated with lower likelihood of co-occurring developmental disabilities in autistic individuals and higher SNP heritability for autistic males and for autistic individuals without ID.

It is argued that there is currently insufficient evidence to establish meaningful ASD specificity of any genes based on large-effect rare-variant data.

Clinicians need to understand how gastrointestinal issues present and apply effective therapies to effective treatment of gastrointestinal problems in autism spectrum disorder, as well as studied risk factors.

This review summarizes recent developments in human genetics research in autism, complemented by epigenetic and transcriptomic findings, and considersable increases in sample sizes needed to better understand the hundreds or thousands of common and rare genetic variants involved.

Several remedies to the problem of heterogeneity compatible with a categorical diagnosis of ASD are proposed, including maintaining a line of research on prototypical autism and reintroducing the qualitative properties of autism presentations and of current dimensional specifiers, language, intelligence, comorbidity, and severity.

Support is presented for the Parvalbumin Hypothesis, which posits that decreased PV level is causally related to the etiology of ASD (and possibly schizophrenia), and the large number of ASD-associated genes according to cellular function and pathways.

It is underscore that individuals with ASD experience a greater burden of comorbidities, which could be partly attributable to the higher rates of perinatal exposures compared to their non-ASD siblings, and if replicated in other samples, can inform the etiology ofComorbidity in ASD.

Early assessment and treatment of antioxidant status may result in a better prognosis as it could decrease the oxidative stress in the brain before it can induce more irreversible brain damage.

This chapter provides a conceptual framework on oxidative stress and antioxidants utility and ways to improve the altered metabolite levels in the interconnected transmethylation and transsulfuration pathways, which has been associated with decreased autistic behaviors and severity.

It is found that adults often have strong emotions after being diagnosed, the process of getting a diagnosis can be unclear and different for everyone, and not many support services are available for adults.

Evidence so far supports the existence of a female-typical autism presentation, the Female Autism Phenotype (FAP) and the component of camouflaging (compensating for and masking autistic characteristics) in particular.

In this national cohort, preterm and early term birth were associated with increased risk of ASD in boys and girls, largely independent of covariates and shared familial factors, consistent with a potential causal relationship.

Recent progress and key findings on neural circuit mechanisms underlying social behavior are outlined, with particular emphasis on rodent studies that monitor and manipulate the activity of specific circuits using modern systems neuroscience approaches and special attention to IC as a unique cortical area that mediates multisensory integration.

A significant opportunity to expedite diagnosis, the need to further understand causes of ID comorbidity, and the necessity to identify effective approaches to the resolution of disparities in severity-of-outcome for AA children with autism are document.

A small but growing body of research has been conducted on vocational outcomes for adults with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD); however, limited resources have been directed towards understanding outcomes for competitive employers. While ASD does present with a range of social communication and adaptive behavior deficits, adults on the spectrum may be extremely efficient, trustworthy, reliable, and cost-effective employees. Nevertheless, fewer than half of young adults with ASD maintain a job. Many businesses are unwilling to hire these capable candidates, concerned among other things about an ...

Connections between ASD and SUD and the impact on development, screening and treatment are explored and culturally constructed narratives associated with both diagnoses are proposed to be responsible for the dearth of research and literature.

A novel methodological framework for parsing neuroanatomical subtypes within a large cohort of individuals with autism, and five biologically based putative subtypes showed morphometric differences from one another, providing a potential explanation for inconsistent case–control findings in autism.

Evidence from human neuroimaging, postmortem, and genetic and pharmacological studies are summarized, and emphasis is put on the GABAergic synaptic dysregulation and consequent E/I imbalance.

Children and adolescents with autism spectrum disorder appear to be more susceptible to adverse effects with medications; therefore, initiation with low doses and titrating very slowly is recommended.

Current psychopharmacological treatment in ASD including those used to address common comorbidities of the condition and upcoming new targeted approaches in autism management are reviewed.

Estimates of the prevalence of autism worldwide reveal an increase in measured autism prevalence globally, reflecting the combined effects of multiple factors including the increase in community awareness and public health response globally, progress in case identification and definition, and an increased in community capacity.