Spectrum: Autism Research News

A $2.4 million government grant will allow researchers at the University of Kansas to continue a 10-year longitudinal study on how parenting affects the development and behavior of children with fragile X syndrome.

Fragile X syndrome is the most common inherited cause of intellectual disability and single-gene cause of autism. About 30 percent of people with the syndrome show features of autism.

Among other questions, the scientists plan to look at how the development of 55 affected children (now adolescents) depends on autism status, biological markers and variations in their mothers’ FMR1 gene.

U.S. clinicians may be less likely to diagnose Hispanic children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) than they are to give non-Hispanic white children the diagnosis, a psychiatrist at a community clinic wrote in an essay published Tuesday in The Guardian. As a result, many Hispanic children with ADHD may not get appropriate treatment.

ADHD and autism frequently occur in the same families, and clinicians often mix up these diagnoses.

The diagnostic gap may stem from any of a number of causes, including poor access to healthcare, lack of insurance, cultural issues and implicit bias, writes Justine Larson, assistant professor in child and adolescent psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University.

At a public symposium on Monday, researchers will report results from the Human Connectome Project, and its analysis of brain scans from more than a thousand healthy adults. The symposium, held in Bethesda, Maryland, marks the end of the project’s first phase.

The project, an initiative of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), aims to provide researchers with a baseline map of connections in the human brain. From there, researchers can spot connectivity differences in people with specific conditions, and tailor treatments accordingly.

In addition to constructing the brain-scan database, scientists built a custom scanner with advanced magnetic resonance imaging technology to visualize networks of neurons in the brain.

The Monday symposium will be held at the NIH campus at 12:30 p.m. EDT, and also will be videocast.

In the world of science, ‘women’s work’ is apparently performing experiments, according to a new analysis of 85,260 scientific articles published between 2008 and 2013 in PLOS journals.

The authors on a research paper might have been involved any of several tasks: analyzing data, designing or doing experiments, supplying materials or analytic tools, and writing. Generally, however, papers don’t specify who did what.

No matter their professional status, women are more likely than men to be doing the experiments, according to the analysis, published in the Journal of the Association of American Medical Colleges last week. Women are also typically associated with one or two types of tasks, whereas men have three or four.

The four researchers behind the analysis recommend clearly noting each scientist’s contributions, as is the practice for PLOS journals and a few others. PLOS papers link each author’s name to that individual’s academic affiliation and role in the study.

Failing to clearly detail researchers’ involvement can reduce accountability in cases of fraud, as well as cover up ghostwriting and the granting of honorary authorship to scientists who made little to no contribution, writes Cassidy R. Sugimoto, associate professor of informatics at Indiana University Bloomington, and her colleagues.

A healthcare technology executive whose son has autism posted six videos that simulate the experiences of a person with autism in a column on Forbes.com last week.

The jarring clips include “Carly’s Café,” in which Carly Fleischmann, a nonverbal young woman with autism, embellishes a café visit with light and sound to illustrate the sensory cacophony that can overwhelm her. “Walking Down the Street” by Craig Thomson, a young man with autism who is behind the “Autism Survival Manual” on YouTube, evokes a similar sensory experience from a simple stroll down an urban sidewalk.

The videos do not perfectly reflect the world of a person with autism, but they can help the rest of us gain a greater understanding of the challenges such individuals face, says the essay’s author, Robert Szczerba.

Beth Dumont has been hired by the Jackson Laboratory as an assistant professor. She studies the cellular mechanisms that give rise to genetic variation, including that associated with disease. She is now a postdoctoral scholar at the Initiative for Biological Complexity at North Carolina State University.

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