Autism has been making headlines recently-big time. Top billing goes to the mistaken perception that vaccines are a causative factor. Closely-spaced pregnancies comes in second, followed by promising MRI research.

For starters, the 1998 study by British medical researcher Dr. Andrew Wakefield establishing a link between autism and vaccines-specifically the measles-mumps-rubella vaccine–has since been discredited. Although published in the highly-regarded medical journal Lancet at the time, it was based on falsified data. The good doctor has since lost his right to practice medicine in Britain, and last year Lancet retracted the study.

Nevertheless, countless parents have and continue to heed his warning. Indeed, nearly 40% of American parents have either refused or delayed having their children vaccinated, choosing to ignore the fourteen independent studies that have since found no link between the shots and the disorder.

Says Hatfield mom Mrs. B., “There are bad substances in those vaccines, yet they want us to go ahead and inject our kids with the stuff. I allowed it and now both of my sons are on the spectrum.”

Explains Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia’s Dr. Paul Offit, “This [study] scared people, and it’s hard to unscare them.”

Meanwhile, the truth is that now, on average, one in every 110 children is diagnosed with an autism spectrum disorder, or ASD, and so researchers continue to seek answers. The latest discovery deals not with vaccines but with the timing of pregnancies.

A Washington Post headline put it this way: “Pregnancies Spaced Closely Together Result in Higher Autism Risk.” This conclusion was based on a study of 663,000 second-born children born between 1992 and 2002 in California. In fact, it was found that babies conceived within one year of the first child’s birth were more than three times more likely to be autistic than those conceived after two or three years.

Then there’s the matter of diagnosis. Harvard University’s Dr. Nicholas Lange has helped develop a biological test-the very first-to detect autism by using a special MRI to look into the brain. As to the findings, he explains, “We found six physical features of the brain’s wiring that could help distinguish individuals that had previously been diagnosed with autism with 94% accuracy.”

» Read more: Autism Update: Vaccines, Pregnancies, and a Special MRI