Spectrum: Autism Research News

On Tuesday, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration issued a safety alert for aripiprazole (Abilify), an antipsychotic drug approved for irritability related to autism.

Abilify is one of two drugs approved for autism-related issues. Risperidone (Risperdal) was the first drug approved to treat children with autism. It has been shown to reduce explosive and aggressive behavior. However, the drug does not improve autism’s core symptoms and comes with significant side effects, including weight gain from increased appetite as well as potential drowsiness and hormonal changes.

Abilify, too, was already known to have a reported side effect: pathological gambling. The latest warning advises healthcare workers to inform their colleagues and clients that the drug’s effects may extend beyond a compulsive urge to gamble, to a similar desire to binge on sex, food or shopping. Healthcare workers should also monitor people treated with the drug for signs of these compulsive behaviors. Reducing the dose or taking patients off the drug can eliminate these effects.

Aripiprazole also is prescribed for schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and Tourette syndrome. Individuals can report adverse events related to taking aripiprazole here: www.fda.gov/MedWatch/report.

Researchers have extended the lifespan of lab-grown human embryos to 13 days after fertilization. The previous record was nine days.

The in vitro achievement, detailed this week in two separate papers in Nature and Nature Cell Biology, already has provided new insights into fetal development, and could aid stem cell research and efforts to understand why some pregnancies fail.

“It’s really embarrassing at the beginning of the twenty-first century that we know more about fish and mice and frogs than we know about ourselves,” Ali Brivanlou, professor of stem cell biology and molecular embryology at Rockefeller University in New York City and lead researcher on the Nature paper, told Nature.

Efforts to extend the lifespan of lab-grown embryos may soon bump up against laws in several nations, including the United Kingdom, Sweden, Canada, Denmark, the Netherlands, Spain and Australia, that ban growing human embryos that are more than 14 days old.

In response to the new achievement, three bioethics specialists published an accompanying commentary in Nature calling for additional reflection on the 14-day limit and its benefits and detriments as a policy tool.

Most researchers fail to register and publish the results of clinical trials on radiation therapy within a year, in violation of the law, according to results presented 30 April at the European Society for Radiotherapy and Oncology annual meeting.

The 2007 law requires publication on clinicaltrials.gov, an open-access registry of human experimental results across all biomedical and behavioral fields, within a year of completing the trial. The registry is operated by the National Library of Medicine at the National Institutes of Health.

Jaime Pérez-Alija and Pedro Gallego, medical physicists at Hospital Plató in Barcelona, Spain, examined the publication rate of radiotherapy trials completed before 1 January 2013. They found that 81.7 percent of 802 trials failed to publish even a brief summary of their results.

Some of the trials might have been granted deadline extensions. Others’ results might have been published in journals, Pérez-Alija and Gallego acknowledge.

Still, the publication rate was worse than before the law was passed, the team discovered. Results from 76.4 percent of trials conducted before 2007 were not deposited in the registry. Failure to publish results at the centralized registry puts participants at risk by denying them full knowledge of the state of research.

Finding enough people to participate in a clinical trial can be challenging for autism researchers, among others. Large numbers are often necessary for a trial to yield meaningful results. If scientists can identify the factors that influence decisions about participation, they could improve, and potentially standardize, recruitment strategies.

A computing technology called ‘machine learning’ can help scientists predict and understand why some people agree or decline to participate in clinical trials. The technique allows software to detect patterns in data and learn from these patterns without being programmed with specific rules.

A team led by Yizhao Ni at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center in Ohio developed an algorithm that can predict a person’s inclination to participate in a clinical trial. The findings, published last week in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, suggest that people are more likely to participate in disease-specific trials than more general ones, and less likely to sign up for long-term studies than one-visit affairs.

The algorithm requires more testing before it is ready for widespread use, the researchers say.

A documentary explores a romantic relationship between an unusual middle-aged pair with Asperger syndrome: a man and a trans woman who is undergoing gender reassignment surgery.

John Gelmon and Martine Stonehouse met and fell in love more than a decade ago at events organized by the Geneva Centre for Autism in Toronto. At some point, Martine told John that she started out as a boy, but now lives and identifies as a woman.

John decides that he wants to marry Martine, but only if she goes through with the surgery. “Transfixed” follows the couple as Martine prepares for and has the operation. The pair deals daily with other issues too, including John’s Tourette syndrome and Martine’s obesity, diabetes and hypertension. Director Alon Kol succeeds at portraying the couple as both unique and ordinary, according to a review in The New York Times.

The film allows for moments of humor, but conveys the sadness and isolation of the couple as a result of the stigma they face as people with autism compounded by Martine’s transgender status.