The National Children’s Study, a decade-old effort to track children’s health from birth to age 21, is undergoing radical restructuring to cut costs. The streamlined version of the project has left scientists and autism advocacy groups concerned that the study will not provide the answers they had hoped.

Women who have high levels of C-reactive protein, a marker of inflammation, early in their pregnancies are at increased risk of having children with autism, reports a study published 22 January in Molecular Psychiatry.

Researchers have developed a technique that allows them to remove a functioning placenta from a pregnant mouse late in gestation, they reported 8 January in Nature Protocols.

Maternal health seems to have little impact on autism risk, according to a study published 7 January in PLoS One. The more serious risk is for intellectual disability, which can often occur along with autism.

In families that have more than one child with autism, children who are born later have lower intelligence scores than their older siblings do, according to research published 11 November in PLoS ONE.

Children with autism have higher levels than controls of dendritic cells, a subset of immune cells, according to a study published 11 October in Brain Behavior and Immunity.

Women who have the flu while pregnant double their risk of having a child with autism, according to a large study published 12 November in Pediatrics. The results add to growing evidence of a connection between maternal infection and autism.

Chromosomal microarray is more sensitive than the current gold-standard method for detecting genetic abnormalities in a fetus. But the technology isn’t yet ready for use in all pregnant women.

Heavier newborns have larger brains later in life, and a larger cerebral cortex — the brain region responsible for high-level functions such as consciousness and language. The findings, published 19 November in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, are the first to assess birth weight’s connection to brain development.

The risk of developing autism increases for every week short of 37 weeks of gestation, according to a large epidemiological study published 1 September in The Journal of Pediatrics.