Federal health officials on Thursday announced a crackdown on a controversial therapy widely hawked on the Internet and elsewhere as an alternative treatment for conditions such as autism, Alzheimer’s disease and Parkinson’s disease by “cleansing” the body. Continue Reading

by Jon Hamilton, NPR

Children with autism tend to have brothers and sisters with language delays and other, less obvious characteristics of the disorder. Continue Reading

By Frederik Joelving, Reuters

A new government study adds to the evidence that thimerosal, a mercury-based preservative until recently found in many vaccines, does not increase children’s risk of autism. Continue Reading

By Linda Borg

The Groden Network will participate in a $10-million, five-year grant for the development of new technology for measuring and analyzing behavior in children with autism.

The project will be headed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Media Lab. Continue Reading

by Len Cannon / 11 khou.com

While Apple’s I-Pad is known for its convenience and high-tech capabilities, it’s also being used to help change the lives of autistic children. Continue Reading

The world’s largest genetic scan of people with autism in their families has found that many patients have their own unique pattern of genetic mutations, not necessarily inherited. Continue Reading

By SHIRLEY S. WANG

By taking scans of sleeping children, researchers are discovering what occurs in the brains of babies and young children with autism.Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI, to peer at images of the children’s brains, researchers from the University of California, San Diego, found that autistic children as young as 14 months use different brain regions than youngsters with more typical development when hearing bedtime stories. Continue Reading

By Mark Roth, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

There is something obviously wrong in the brains of people with autism, and one of the chief symptoms of that is the difficulty they have in understanding other people’s emotions and intentions.But exactly what causes that social awkwardness is still being debated among neuroscientists — and the debate only got sharper on Wednesday. Continue Reading

By Jenifer Goodwin
HealthDay Reporter

FRIDAY, May 7 (HealthDay News) — Infections during infancy or childhood do not seem to raise the risk of autism, new research finds. Continue Reading

The MIND Institute at UC Davis is enrolling participants in clinical trials for an autism treatment developed by Curemark LLC, a drug research and development company in Rye, N.Y. Continue Reading