Reporter Notebook: Highlights from Insar 2025

Seattle – From April 30 to May 3, almost 2,300 participants from more than 50 countries gathered at the Seattle Convention annual conference for the International Society for Autism Research (inar) to discuss the latest scientific advances in autism research. As an inar science chairman Meng-Chuan Lai, senior scientist at the Center for Addiction and Mental Health in Canada, autism researchers and lawyers had gathered in his opening speeches in the middle of the “unprecedented political times”.

Some spokesmen alluded to the threat in researching the financing in the United States – a view that the new inar President Brian Boyd also took in a comment The transmitter. The tension between scientists and autistic communities also occurred in discussions during the meeting. In a keynote, the autistic scientist and activist Dora Raymaker, Research Associate Professor of Social Work at Portland State University, invited the participants to imagine a future in which the two groups work together in creative, productive way. She encouraged the audience to “use many types of knowledge” and warned the people against “rejecting a paradigm just because it was used for damage in the past”.

During the four days of the meeting, many well -known scientific threads appeared in posters and panels. Here are only a few remarkable topics – and we ask readers to add their observations in the comment area.

• Several scientists discussed their efforts to define subgroups within the autism spectrum. For example, Michael Lombardo, Senior Researcher at the Italian Institute of Technology, demonstrated that the clustering of data in the first 10 years of life in the first 10 years of subtypes with different development courses in intellectual, intellectual, motor and adaptive functions related to the early language of a child related. Other research groups have emphasized approaches that affect the imaging of the brain, transcriptomics, the deep learning and other clinical characteristics.
• Several researchers discussed the definition of “profound autism”. Catherine Lord, George Tarjan at the University of California, Los Angeles, described the professor of psychiatry and education at the University of California lancet The Commission's approach to this task and the results of a Delphi consensus process to question clinicians about their understanding of this term. And Matthew Siegel, head of the clinical company in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences in the Boston Children's Hospital, presented results of the inpatient cohort of autism, which indicate that measures for adaptive functions are a powerful instrument for identifying autistic people with the greatest support needs.
  
• The work discussed in other panels and sessions examined the boring role of stimulation and inhibition in autism. For example, Viola Hollestein, a research assistant in forensic and neurological developmental sciences at King's College London, presented preliminary results from AIMS 2 -jump, which indicates strong connections between the polygenes of a person for Thalamic -Glutamat (an exciting mechanism) and social reaction. During a panel on brain wiring, Alexia Stuefer, a post -doctoral student in functional neuroimaging at the Italian Institute of Technology, described how chemogenetic the suggestion for transgenic mice during a certain window leads to permanent changes in conviviality and the reactionability of pyramidal neurons. In the same committee, Hyun Kim, extraordinary professor of clinical and advisory psychology at Korea University, shared knowledge from works that used the aperiodic exponent of the EEG-Echt as a proxy for an imbalance of the suggestion.
• Finding animal models and reliable biomarkers remains important efforts in autism research. In a panel that focused on fragile X syndrome, Sarah Lippé, professor of psychology at the Université de Montreal, discussed how changes in the EEG marker could reflect the severity of the behavioral characteristics in humans with this disease. Later, Khaler Razak, Professor of Psychology at the University of California, Riverside, presented results on time processing in a fragile X mouse model. In a separate session that focused on rare animal models, David Amaral, professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the University of California, the Davis Mind Institute, described a potential new CHD8 -Rhesus -Makaken model.
• The epidemiologist Guohua Li from Columbia University presented knowledge on the life expectations of Medicaid -beneficiaries with autism in the USA, based on data from 2000 to 2020: autistic people in Medicaid live less than those who are privately insured and 6 years less than the general Medicaid population. The greatest gaps were among autistic people who identified themselves as Hispan or as women. The Covid 19 pandemic may have had a particularly significant impact on autistic people. According to 2020, the deaths in the autistic population on Medicaid were twice as high as in privately insured autistic people and the general population on medicaid, as Li.
• Several research groups described their efforts to use video tools and artificial intelligence in order to better evaluate and understand autism features in a variety of domains. As an example, Ilan Dinstein, Professor of Psychology at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, discussed his work, to pursue both stereotypical movements and facial expressions in autistic children with machine learning.
• “I wanted to carry out a year of research” before I went to private practice, Joe Piven, Professor of Psychiatry and Pediatrics at the Medical School of Medicine at the University of North Carolina, recalled during an approach for a lifelong achievement. Piven announced how this one year became a decades of career and emphasized the power of “happy accidents”, which presented his interest in child psychiatry, autism and genetics.