Scientists discover genetic ‘missing links’ underlying mechanism of psychiatric diseases

By Sarah C.P. Williams UCLA researchers, in global collaboration, gain new understanding of brain architecture of autism, schizophrenia Since the completion of the groundbreaking Human Genome Project in 2003, researchers have discovered changes to hundreds of parts of DNA, called genetic variants, that are associated with autism spectrum disorder, schizophrenia and other psychiatric diseases. Now, a new, large-scale study has linked many of those changes in DNA to their molecular effects in the brain, revealing […]

Child Bearing and The Challenges of Intellectual Disability

By Lydia Furman, MD, Associate Editor, Pediatrics In a recently released issue of Pediatrics, Dr. Hilary Brown and colleagues from Toronto, Canada ask an important question: are mothers with intellectual and developmental disability (IDD) more or less likely to have their infants placed in protective custody immediately after birth compared to mothers without such a disability (10.1542/peds.2018-1416)? The authors used several large and complete national health information databases to answer their question. A total of […]

A Connecticut Cafe Provides Jobs For Adults With Disabilities

  Adults with intellectual disabilities often struggle to find work. Over 80-percent are under-employed or not working at all, according to an estimate by the Arc, a nonprofit that assists people with intellectual and developmental disabilities. So a group of Connecticut families started a cafe named BeanZ & Co. to tackle the problem head-on. On a recent day, Lauren Traceski took an order from a customer, then relayed it to her boss, who started up […]

Stranger Safety for Your Special Needs Child

When we envision a child with Down syndrome navigating the world without adult supervision, fears about encounters with strangers naturally surface. Many individuals with Down syndrome are friendly and trusting, by nature, and respond warmly to a new acquaintance, a trait that is generally celebrated by those who are privileged to meet them. But, this endearing quality creates a vulnerability that obligates parents to teach them to distinguish between acceptable, harmless exchanges with strangers and […]

2,000 Human Brains Yield Clues To How Genes Raise Risk For Mental Illnesses

Artificial intelligence model improves prediction six-fold It’s one thing to detect sites in the genome associated with mental disorders; it’s quite another to discover the biological mechanisms by which these changes in DNA work in the human brain to boost risk. In their first concerted effort to tackle the latter, 15 collaborating research teams of the National Institutes of Health-funded PsychENCODE Consortium (link is external) leveraged statistical power gained from a large sample of about […]