Researchers can reliably identify individuals with autism by looking at the expression pattern of a set of genes in cultured blood cells, according to a poster presented Friday at the IMFAR 2010 conference in Philadelphia.

If the method can be validated in a larger and more diverse sample, it may lead to a useful diagnostic test, researchers say.

The current standard for autism diagnosis, a thorough behavioral assessment, has several disadvantages, notes lead investigator Valerie Hu, professor of biochemistry and molecular biology at George Washington University. For instance, children may not show the full extent of their behavioral oddities on the test day, and their behavior may change over time.

“We’re aiming for a more objective, molecular diagnosis, if possible,” Hu says. “This is not it, but it’s a start.”

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SFARI, May 2010.

Children who have autism and their healthy siblings share patterns of brain activity that are different than those seen in children with no family history of the disorder, according to unpublished research presented Thursday at the IMFAR 2010 conference in Philadelphia.

Because the siblings do not show even mild autistic behaviors, the brain activity represents a useful ‘endophenotype’ — a quantifiable trait that arises from carrying autism risk genes, rather than as the result of having the disorder, the researchers say.

“We were stunned that we could find something out about the brain that seems to not be observable with any of your standard clinical tools,” says lead investigator Kevin Pelphrey, associate professor of child psychiatry at the Yale Child Study Center.

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SFARI, May 2010.

Adolescents with autism can gauge the direction of moving objects just as well as healthy controls can, but their confidence in their visual ability is sometimes misplaced, according to unpublished data presented yesterday at the IMFAR 2010 conference in Philadelphia.

The results suggest that people with autism have trouble not with perceiving motion, but with using that information to make decisions, the researchers say.

Studies of motion perception often use animated dots, some fraction of which are moving in the same direction. Healthy people can pick out this so-called ‘coherent motion’ when about 10 percent of the dots move in the same direction. Previous work suggested that people with autism need about three times as many dots to see the ‘hidden’ movement.

Richard Krauzlis and colleagues at the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California, used the same test, but with a twist.

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SFARI, May 2010.

How interested a child with autism is in a social scene can be determined in the blink of an eye — literally.

That was the message from scientists who yesterday presented a new method for measuring blink rate during visual perception tasks at the IMFAR 2010 conference in Philadelphia.

Eye-tracking studies of children with autism have shown that they view the world in unusual ways. For example, when they look at a face, toddlers with autism as young as 15 months tend to spend more time looking at the mouth or other peripheral features, rather than at the eyes.

Just because these children look at a particular spot does not mean they think it’s important, however.

“We wanted to develop a measure that would allow us to quantify, on a moment-by-moment basis, how engaged a person is in what they’re attending to,” says Sarah Shultz, a graduate student in the laboratory of Ami Klin at the Yale Child Study Center.

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SFARI, May 2010.