The so-called trust hormone oxytocin could prove to be an effective treatment for autism, but it’s premature for parents to be dosing their kids with the hormone, researchers warn.

Giving people oxytocin has shown that the hormone boosts the willingness to trust others. Animal studies and small clinical trials have also linked...→

The gene underlying Rett syndrome has a surprisingly large role in controlling the activity of other genes, according to two recent papers.

The findings have dismayed some researchers, who say the condition may be more difficult to treat than previously thought.

Rett syndrome is a rare neurological condition that shares some symptoms, such...→

Rare, spontaneous mutations could account for at least 10 percent of cases of schizophrenia, according a study published online last week¹.

These mutations are deletions or duplications of DNA segments, dubbed copy number variations (CNVs).

Although submicroscopic in stature, CNVs have for the past two years been implicated in neurological disorders such...→

For much of the twentieth century, autism was considered childhood schizophrenia.

Shared problems with language and social interaction lumped them together. Doctors thought as the children grew older, they simply became more psychotic and delusional.

But, in 1943, Leo Kanner, a psychiatrist at Johns Hopkins University, suggested that children who have an “innate...→

In the past few days, the New York Times has run a couple of articles featuring people with autism.

This isn’t unusual in of itself, except that neither article ran in the health section. And both take a compassionate look at individuals who struggle with autism in profound ways.

The first, which ran...→

Autism is sometime called the result of an ‘extreme male brain’.

And the classic traits associated with the disorder — social awkwardness and obsessive interests, for example — are associated with, and better tolerated in, men than in women.

Add to this the statistics — that autism affects four times as many boys...→

Everyone in the scientific community is talking about Francis Collins’ unexpected decision to step down on 1 August as director of the US National Human Genome Research Institute.

Collins is a giant among geneticists, and championed many pivotal projects including, most notably, the Human Genome Project. Among his newer ventures are the...→

I try not to spend too much time on the vaccine theories because as far as I’m concerned, they’re well-trod territory: all evidence suggests that neither thimerosal, nor the triple jab for mumps-measles-rubella (MMR) causes autism.

But occasionally, events in the world force me to address the issue. Last week, a special...→