Each month our editorial team sifts through hundreds of papers and curates notable findings—for practitioners and informed readers who want to stay current with the evidence. Subscribe to the monthly Research Digest for expert analysis and concise summaries of key papers.
The study introduced the Autism-Spectrum Quotient (AQ), a short self-test that gives a score from 0 to 50 to measure autistic traits in adults with normal intelligence. The researchers tested four groups (58 adults with Asperger/high-functioning autism; 174 random controls; 840 Cambridge students; and 16 math Olympiad winners) and found…
Researchers tested the 80-question Ritvo Autism Asperger Diagnostic Scale-Revised (RAADS-R) in 779 adults at nine centers on three continents. The tool showed large score differences between 201 people with confirmed Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) and 578 comparison participants, and the authors concluded it is a useful tool to help clinicians…
This review looked at eye-tracking studies of infants, toddlers, and young children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) or at risk for ASD. Eye tracking is a non-invasive way to record where children look, and studies show early differences: reduced looking at people and faces and trouble shifting attention can appear…
Portrayals of autism spectrum disorder in film, television and literature often show special or "savant" skills: a young child who can crack advanced codes, an adult with astonishing memory, or a musician who can play any tune by ear after a single hearing. Are such portrayals realistic or helpful? Special…
This document presents an “emerging” 2-item clinician-rated measure from the American Psychiatric Association to record how much social communication problems and restricted interests/repetitive behaviors interfere with a person’s functioning. Each domain is rated by a clinician for the past seven days on a 4-point scale from 0 (None) to 3…
Researchers studied 1004 people with bipolar I disorder who had at least one depressive episode. They found that people who received antidepressant treatment were more likely to have a manic episode within eight weeks after their depression got better. A genetic marker (rs10262219) showed a strong signal in the first…
The authors made a score that measures how male-typical a person’s subcortical brain shape is. They trained this score on 2,153 people and then measured it in 1,060 people with autism and 1,166 neurotypical controls. People with autism had a small, higher average “brain maleness” score (d = 0.20), and…
This paper reports a 10-year-old girl who developed childhood disintegrative disorder after normal development until about age 5. She lost language, social skills, toilet control, and self-care, showed repetitive hand movements, had a CT scan showing reduced brain volume and an IQ of 37.5, and then showed partial improvement in…
This review combined 134 studies (159 experiments) that tried to tell apart people with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) from healthy controls using resting-state MRI. Across studies the pooled accuracy was moderate: about 76% sensitivity, 75.7% specificity, and an AUC of 0.823. However, the authors say there is a lot of…
The present study highlights that the PES is suitable for assessing empathy across autistic and non-autistic individuals. This work with the PES also provides greater nuance to our understanding of empathy and autism, and based on these findings, we propose the empathy heterogeneity hypothesis of autism as a new way…
