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It doesn't explain why Adam Lanza slaughtered 20 first graders and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary almost two years ago to the day, but a new study has found that autism changes the way that people with the disorder see faces. The way people with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) gather information – not the judgment process itself – might explain why they gain different perceptions from peoples’ faces, according to a new study from Hôpital Rivière-des-Prairies and the University of Montreal, as reported by newswise.com. "The evaluation of an individual's face is a rapid process that influences our future relationship with the individual," said Baudouin Forgeot d'Arc, lead author of the study. "By studying these judgments, we wanted to better understand how people with ASD use facial features as cues. Do they need more cues to be able to make the same judgment?"  When photographic images of neutral faces were presented to two groups, the j...

It's sad.  But families with an autistic child are about one-third less likely to have another child, according to newswise.com. "While it has been postulated that parents who have a child with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) may be reluctant to have more children, this is the first time that anyone has analyzed the question with hard numbers,” said Neil Risch, PhD, a UCSF professor of epidemiology and biostatistics and director of the UCSF Institute for Human Genetics.  The Web site notes that the study is the first to provide convincing statistical evidence that "reproductive stoppage exists and should be taken into account when calculating the risks for having a another child with ASD,” said Risch, who is senior author on the paper. “These findings have important implications for genetic counseling of affected families.” Overall, families whose first child had ASD were one-third less likely to have a second child than control families, the study found. F...

First they blamed the moms.  Then they blamed the vaccines.  Now research is showing that some cases of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) may actually be environmentally-caused. The findings, according to newswise.com, "shed light on why older mothers are at increased risk for having children with ASD and could pave the way for more research into the role of environment on ASD."  The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced in March that one in 68 U.S. children has an ASD—a 30 percent rise from 1 in 88 two years ago. A significant number of people with an ASD have gene mutations that are responsible for their condition. But a number of studies—particularly those involving identical twins, in which one twin has ASD and the other does not—show that not all ASD cases arise from mutations, the Web site reports.  Other studies have shown that genes may only be responsible in half  the cases of ASD diagnosed, newswise notes.  Media ...