The literature on international travellers with psychiatric disorders is limited. This perspective article highlights various travel-related aspects of autism spectrum disorder (ASD), including its aetiological association with maternal migration, the difficulties faced by long-term travelers with autistic children, and the facilitation of international travel for autistic individuals by the tr...

BACKGROUND Our understanding of anatomical differences in people with autistic-spectrum disorder, is based on mixed-gender or male samples. AIMS To study regional grey-matter and white-matter differences in the brains of women with autistic-spectrum disorder. METHOD We compared the brain anatomy of 14 adult women with autistic-spectrum disorder with 19 controls using volumetric magnetic res...

Children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD), including autistic disorder, frequently suffer from comorbid sleep problems. An altered melatonin rhythm is considered to underlie the impairment in sleep onset and maintenance in ASD. We report three cases with autistic disorder in whom nocturnal symptoms improved with ramelteon, a selective melatonin receptor agonist. Insomnia and behavior, asses...

BACKGROUND Recent research has indicated that autism is not a discrete disorder and that family members of autistic probands have an increased likelihood of exhibiting autistic symptoms with a wide range of severity, often below the threshold for a diagnosis of an autism spectrum disorder. OBJECTIVE To examine the distribution and genetic structure of autistic traits in the general population...

Autistic disorder is a largely misunderstood and difficult to treat neurodevelopmental disorder. Three core domains of functioning are affected by autistic disorder, ie, socialization, communication, and behavior. Signs of autistic disorder may be present early, but are frequently overlooked, resulting in a delay in its diagnosis and a subsequent delay in treatment. No one definitive therapy is...

background parents’ mental health could be intensively influenced by disabled child, especially when there is a disorder such as autism including a wide range of behaviors and particularly social behaviors. this study aimed to evaluate the effect of negative mood management training on mental health and depression of mothers of children with autistic disorder. material and methods sample of thi...

Although high-functioning individuals with autistic disorder (i.e. autism and Asperger syndrome) are of normal intelligence, they have life-long abnormalities in social communication and emotional behaviour. However, the biological basis of social difficulties in autism is poorly understood. Facial expressions help shape behaviour, and we investigated if high-functioning people with autistic di...

Autism is a behaviourally defined disorder. The impairments in social communication and repetitive behaviours are individually non-specific. The disorder has indistinct boundaries both with other psychiatric disorders and with normal personality types. At the cognitive level, groups of people with autistic disorder can be differentiated from people without the disorder by their ability to reaso...

Cross-sectional magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) studies have long hypothesized that the brain in children with autism undergoes an abnormal growth trajectory that includes a period of early overgrowth; however, this has never been confirmed by a longitudinal study. We performed the first longitudinal study of brain growth in toddlers at the time symptoms of autism are becoming clinically appar...