A matched case-control study of 50 children with autism spectrum disorder and 50 controls found that newborn amino acid metabolism overlapped with both later autism diagnosis and prenatal air-pollution exposure.1 The central pathway, aspartate and asparagine metabolism, was associated with autism (p = 0.01), pregnancy PM2.5 (p < 0.001), first-trimester PM2.5 (p < 0.001), and …
A 2026 medRxiv preprint using parent-cocreated sensory-related outcome measures found that 83% of children and teens improved on at least 1 PROMIS domain during 6 months of bumetanide treatment.1 The result is interesting, but the unmasked single-case design means the strongest claim is about sensitive outcome tracking, not definitive bumetanide efficacy. Research Highlights Most participants …
A 2026 juvenile rat study found that inactivating the ventral pallidum or stimulating nucleus accumbens GABA terminals in the ventral pallidum reduced social play behavior in both sexes, pointing to a specific reward-circuit pathway required for normal play expression.1 Research Highlights VP inactivation reduced play: bilateral muscimol infusion into the ventral pallidum reduced juvenile social …
A 2026 medRxiv preprint found that 26 autistic children performed similarly to 25 typically developing children on objective SPACE navigation tasks, contrary to the prediction, while autistic children rated their own navigation ability lower on the Santa Barbara Sense of Direction scale.1 Research Highlights Objective performance did not separate groups: 26 autistic children and 25 …
A 337-person SYNGAP1-DEE registry preprint found caregiver-reported autistic behavior scores linked most strongly to atypical absence seizures (n = 77; FDR-adjusted p = .001), while peak seizure-frequency ratings were not detectably associated with those behavior scores.1 Research Highlights Seizure type carried the signal: atypical absences were associated with higher caregiver-reported autistic behavior scores in 77 …
A 2025 paper by Gu et al. in Molecular Psychiatry — the largest study of its kind — finds that higher common-variant genetic risk for autism predicts lower cortical neurite density in 31,748 UK Biobank adults and 4,928 ABCD children.1 The effect is small in absolute terms but replicates across cohorts and methods. Research Highlights …
A 166-child resting-state fMRI study found that clinician-observed autism severity, not ADHD severity, tracked connectivity strength between a left middle frontal gyrus node and the posterior cingulate/default mode network across children diagnosed with autism or ADHD without autism. The result is transdiagnostic, but asymmetrical: autism traits carried the connectome signal after ADHD ratings were controlled.1 …