By mapping a portion of a mouse brain, researchers from the University of Southern California (USC) believe that they may have found another piece in the puzzle that will help them to find new treatments for both Huntingdon’s disease and autism. Previously uncharted, this area of the brain was examined by the researchers in order to find out more about ...

A researcher from Northwestern University in the United States has found a way to measure how our brains make sense of sound, and has suggested that the ability of our brain to process sound is influenced by a variety of things, including learning new languages, playing music, hearing loss and hearing disorders, and even aging. Professor Nina Kraus, director of ...

Babies who are born prematurely have a greater chance of developing autism, ADHD and emotional disorders than other children. Researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis now think they might have uncovered one of the reasons why. The researchers carried out a study which compared the MRI scans of the brains of 76 premature babies and 58 ...

The director of the National Institute of Mental Health, Thomas R. Insel, has been lured away from his position to take up a post with the Google Life Science group at Alphabet, the company formerly known as Google. The team at Google Life Sciences (GLS) are currently looking at ways to develop new technologies which will have the potential to ...

Scientists have discovered that the region of the brain responsible for interpreting social cues among people who have been diagnosed with autism, differs depending on gender. They found that the region is unusually smooth in males, but normal in females. The findings of the study were published in a recent edition of the journal ‘Molecular Autism’ and add further evidence ...

Researchers have presented a new study which suggests that parents with an age gap of 10 years or more may have a higher risk of having a child with autism. The study was based on the analysis of almost 6 million children from Australia, Israel, Denmark, Sweden and Norway and, while previous research has already established an association between older ...

New research, which hopes to discover the origins of autism, has been carried out by Flora Vaccarino, a Yale physician and neurobiologist, and her colleagues. Using reprogrammed skin cells, the scientists were able to grow a large group of miniature proto-brains in their lab, which they hoped would show the early days of the brain’s development. By studying these clusters ...

According to a new study published in Current Biology, a ‘sniff test’ may be able to help with the early diagnosis of autism, as researchers have discovered that children with autism are unable to adjust the way they deal with pleasant or bad smells. When we smell something pleasant, we’re likely to inhale more deeply in order to take advantage ...

A new study carried out at the Kaiser Permanente Southern California Department of Research and Evaluation has shown that children may be at a higher risk of developing autism if their mother has received a diabetes diagnosis before the 26th week of their pregnancy. Women who were diagnosed with diabetes early in their pregnancy were 42% more likely to give ...

Research out of the University of Missouri has provided probable evidence that families who own dogs have reported positive benefits to children with autism. The benefits include companionship, the learning of responsibility, opportunities for the development and deepening of empathy and stress relief. Children who are diagnosed with autism often have trouble relating to and socialising with others. This unfortunately ...