By Maia Szalavitz One of the hardest challenges for families facing autism is the problem of touch. Often, autistic children resist hugging and other types of physical contact, causing distress all around. Now, a new study offers insight into why some people shrug off physical touches and how families affected by autism may learn to share hugs without overwhelming an autistic child’s senses. Yale neuroscientists recruited 19 young adults and imaged their brain activity as a researcher lightly brushed them on the forearm with a soft watercolor paintbrush. In some cases, the brushing was quick, and in others slow: prior studies have shown that most people like slow brushing and perceive it as affectionate contact, while the faster version is felt as less pleasant and more tickle-like. None of the participants in the current study had autism, but the researchers evaluated them for autistic traits — things like a preference for sameness, order and systems, rather than social interaction. They found that participants with the highest levels of autistic traits had a lower response in key social brain regions — the superior temporal sulcus (STS) and orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) — to the slow brushing. According to Martha Kaiser, senior author of the study and associate director of the Child Neuroscience Laboratory at the Yale Child Study Center, the STS is a critical hub of the social brain. “This region is important for perceiving the people around us, for visual social stimuli and for perceiving social versus nonsocial sounds,” she says. © 2012 Time Inc.

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 7: Life-Span Development of the Brain and Behavior; Chapter 8: General Principles of Sensory Processing, Touch, and Pain
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 13: Memory, Learning, and Development; Chapter 5: The Sensorimotor System
Link ID: 16549 - Posted: 03.22.2012

Ewen Callaway A bone-marrow transplant can treat a mouse version of Rett syndrome, a severe autism spectrum disorder that affects roughly 1 in 10,000–20,000 girls born worldwide (boys with the disease typically die within a few weeks of birth). The findings, published today in Nature1, suggest that brain-dwelling immune cells called microglia are defective in Rett syndrome. The authors say their findings also raise the possibility that bone-marrow transplants or other means of boosting the brain’s immune cells could help to treat the disease. “If we show the immune system is playing a very important role in Rett patients and we could replace it in a safe way, we may develop some feasible therapies in the future,” says Jonathan Kipnis, a neuroscientist at the University of Virginia School of Medicine in Charlottesville, who led the study. Mutations in a single gene on the X chromosome, MECP2, cause the disease. Because they have only one X chromosome, boys born with the mutation die within weeks of birth. Girls with one faulty copy develop Rett syndrome. Symptoms of Rett syndrome typically set in between 6 and 18 months of age. Girls with the disease have trouble putting on weight and often do not learn to speak. They repeat behaviours such as hand-washing and tend to have trouble walking. Many develop breathing problems and apnoea. Rett syndrome is classified as an autism spectrum disorder, and treatments focus on symptoms such as nutritional and gastrointestinal problems. © 2012 Nature Publishing Group

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 7: Life-Span Development of the Brain and Behavior; Chapter 15: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 13: Memory, Learning, and Development; Chapter 11: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress
Link ID: 16539 - Posted: 03.19.2012

by Carl Zimmer Eric Courchesne managed to find a positive thing about getting polio: It gave him a clear idea of what he would do when he grew up. Courchesne was stricken in 1953, when he was 4. The infection left his legs so wasted that he couldn’t stand or walk. “My mother had to carry me everywhere,” he says. His parents helped him learn how to move his toes again. They took him to a pool to learn to swim. When he was 6, they took him to a doctor who gave him metal braces, and then they helped him learn to hobble around on them. Doctors performed half a dozen surgeries on his legs, grafting muscles to give him more strength. Courchesne was 11 when the braces finally came off, and his parents patiently helped him practice walking on his own. “Through their encouragement, I went on to have dreams beyond what you’d expect,” he says. He went to college at the University of California, Berkeley. One day he stopped to watch the gymnastics team practicing, and the coach asked him to try out. Before long Courchesne was on the team, where he won the western U.S. championship in still rings. When Courchesne wasn’t competing at gymnastics, he was studying neuroscience. “I understood a neurological disorder firsthand, and I wanted to help other children,” he says. Fortunately, the polio outbreak that snared him in 1953 was the last major one in the United States; a vaccine largely eliminated the disease in this country. But in the mid-1980s, as a newly minted assistant professor of neuroscience at the University of California, San Diego, Courchesne encountered a 15-year-old with another kind of devastating neurological disorder: autism. © 2012, Kalmbach Publishing Co.

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 7: Life-Span Development of the Brain and Behavior
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 13: Memory, Learning, and Development
Link ID: 16474 - Posted: 03.06.2012

New research provides evidence that wiring in the brains of children with autism differs from typically developing children as early as six months of age, according to a study published in the American Journal of Psychiatry on Friday. "This is the earliest study of brain development using neuro-imaging," says Geraldine Dawson, Ph.D. "By six months of age, even before the symptoms [of autism] emerge, the brain networks that connect different brain regions do not develop correctly." Dawson is not only one of the study authors, she's also the Chief Science Officer of the advocacy group Autism Speaks, which, along with the National Institutes of Health and the Simons Foundation, funded the research. Researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, along with researchers from other locations of the Infant Brain Imaging Study (IBIS) network, studied 92 babies who were all considered to be at high-risk for developing autism because they had older siblings with the neurodevelopmental disorder. Currently, about one in 110 children in the United States has autism, according to the latest CDC statistics. All 92 infants underwent a type of MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) scan called diffusion tensor imaging. MRIs do not use radiation and therefore are safe to use on babies. © 2010 Cable News Network.

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 7: Life-Span Development of the Brain and Behavior; Chapter 2: Functional Neuroanatomy: The Nervous System and Behavior
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 13: Memory, Learning, and Development; Chapter 2: Cells and Structures: The Anatomy of the Nervous System
Link ID: 16398 - Posted: 02.18.2012

By Ferris Jabr At a meeting of the Icelandic Medical Association last week, Yale University child psychologist Fred Volkmar gave a presentation on how the American Psychiatric Association (APA) is changing the definition of autism. In his talk, Volkmar came to a startling conclusion: more than half of the people who meet the existing criteria for autism would not meet the APA’s new definition of autism and, therefore, may not receive state educational and medical services. The APA defines autism in a reference guide for clinicians called the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Mental Disorders (DSM). The newest version of the manual, the DSM-5, is slated for publication in May 2013. In Iceland, Volkmar presented data from an unpublished preliminary analysis of 372 high-functioning autistic children and adults with IQs above 70. He plans to publish a broader analysis later this year. On a key PowerPoint slide that Volkmar shared with Scientific American, he notes that there are 2,688 ways to get a diagnosis of autistic disorder in DSM-IV, but only six ways to get a diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder in DSM-5. Although intriguing at first glance, it turns out that both these numbers are slightly wrong—and that they are pretty much useless when comparing the DSM-IV and DSM-5. You cannot reduce autism to a math problem. Scientific American wanted to explore this gaping discrepancy further, so we asked astronomer and Hubble Fellow Joshua Peek of Columbia University to code a computer program that would calculate the total possible ways to get a diagnosis of autistic disorder in DSM-IV and the total possible ways to get a diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder in DSM-5. You can do the math by hand, too, if you like: It all comes down to factorials. The DSM-IV criteria are a set of 12 items in three groups from which you must choose 6, with at least two items from group one and at least one item each from groups two and three. © 2012 Scientific American

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 7: Life-Span Development of the Brain and Behavior
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 13: Memory, Learning, and Development
Link ID: 16320 - Posted: 01.31.2012

By Ferris Jabr People have been arguing about autism for a long time—about what causes it, how to treat it and whether it qualifies as a mental disorder. The controversial idea that childhood vaccines trigger autism also persists, despite the fact that study after study has failed to find any evidence of such a link. Now, psychiatrists and members of the autistic community are embroiled in a more legitimate kerfuffle that centers on the definition of autism and how clinicians diagnose the disorder. The debate is not pointless semantics. In many cases, the type and number of symptoms clinicians look for when diagnosing autism determines how easy or difficult it is for autistic people to access medical, social and educational services. The controversy remains front and center because the American Psychiatric Association (APA) has almost finished redefining autism, along with all other mental disorders, in an overhaul of a hefty tome dubbed the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM)—the essential reference guide that clinicians use when evaluating their patients. The newest edition of the manual, the DSM-5, is slated for publication in May 2013. Psychiatrists and parents have voiced concerns that the new definition of autism in the DSM-5 will exclude many people from both a diagnosis and state services that depend on a diagnosis. The devilish confusion is in the details. When the APA publishes the DSM-5, people who have already met the criteria for autism in the current DSM-IV will not suddenly lose their current diagnosis as some parents have feared, nor will they lose state services. But several studies recently published in child psychiatry journals suggest that it will be more difficult for new generations of high-functioning autistic people to receive a diagnosis because the DSM-5 criteria are too strict. Together, the studies conclude that the major changes to the definition of autism in the DSM-5 are well grounded in research and that the new criteria are more accurate than the current DSM-IV criteria. © 2012 Scientific American

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 7: Life-Span Development of the Brain and Behavior
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 13: Memory, Learning, and Development
Link ID: 16319 - Posted: 01.31.2012

By James Gallagher Health and science reporter, BBC News It may be possible to detect autism at a much earlier age than previously thought, according to an international team of researchers. A study published in Current Biology identified differences in infants' brainwaves from as early as six months. Behavioural symptoms of autism typically develop between a child's first and second birthdays. Autism charities said identifying the disorder at an earlier stage could help with treatment. It is thought that one in every 100 children has an autism spectrum disorder in the UK. It affects more boys than girls. While there is no "cure", education and behavioural programmes can help. One of the researchers, Prof Mark Johnson from Birkbeck College, University of London, told the BBC: "The prevailing view is that if we are able to intervene before the onset of full symptoms, such as a training programme, at least in some cases we can maybe alleviate full symptoms." His team looked for the earliest signs of autism in 104 children aged between six and 10 months. Half were known to be at risk of the disorder because they had on older sibling who had been diagnosed with autism. The rest were low risk. Older children with autism can show a lack of eye contact, so the babies were shown pictures of people's faces that switched between looking at or away from the baby. BBC © 2012

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 7: Life-Span Development of the Brain and Behavior
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 13: Memory, Learning, and Development
Link ID: 16309 - Posted: 01.28.2012

By BENEDICT CAREY Proposed changes in the definition of autism would sharply reduce the skyrocketing rate at which the disorder is diagnosed and might make it harder for many people who would no longer meet the criteria to get health, educational and social services, a new analysis suggests. The definition is now being reassessed by an expert panel appointed by the American Psychiatric Association, which is completing work on the fifth edition of its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the first major revision in 17 years. The D.S.M., as the manual is known, is the standard reference for mental disorders, driving research, treatment and insurance decisions. Most experts expect that the new manual will narrow the criteria for autism; the question is how sharply. The results of the new analysis are preliminary, but they offer the most drastic estimate of how tightening the criteria for autism could affect the rate of diagnosis. For years, many experts have privately contended that the vagueness of the current criteria for autism and related disorders like Asperger syndrome was contributing to the increase in the rate of diagnoses — which has ballooned to one child in 100, according to some estimates. The psychiatrists’ association is wrestling with one of the most agonizing questions in mental health — where to draw the line between unusual and abnormal — and its decisions are sure to be wrenching for some families. At a time when school budgets for special education are stretched, the new diagnosis could herald more pitched battles. © 2012 The New York Times Company

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 7: Life-Span Development of the Brain and Behavior
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 13: Memory, Learning, and Development
Link ID: 16278 - Posted: 01.21.2012

Tomorrow, mBio—an online journal by the American Society for Microbiology—will publish new results that show that many autistic children harbor Sutterella bacteria in their digestive tract, contrary to non-autistic children. While this research provides a clear correlation, further study is needed to determine if this difference in digestive tract microorganisms is a cause or effect of autism and what role it plays in this developmental disorder. The underlying reason autism is often associated with gastrointestinal problems is an unknown, but new results to be published in the online journal mBio on January 10 reveal that the guts of autistic children differ from other children in at least one important way: many children with autism harbor a type of bacteria in their guts that non-autistic children do not. The study was conducted by Brent Williams and colleagues at the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University. Earlier work has revealed that autistic individuals with gastrointestinal symptoms often exhibit inflammation and other abnormalities in their upper and lower intestinal tracts. However, scientists do not know what causes the inflammation or how the condition relates to the developmental disorders that characterize autism. The research results appearing in mBio® indicate the communities of microorganisms that reside in the gut of autistic children with gastrointestinal problems are different than the communities of non-autistic children. Whether or not these differences are a cause or effect of autism remains to be seen. “The relationship between different microorganisms and the host and the outcomes for disease and development is an exciting issue,” says Christine A. Biron, the Brintzenhoff Professor of Medical Science at Brown University and editor of the study. “This paper is important because it starts to advance the question of how the resident microbes interact with a disorder that is poorly understood.” SciTechDaily Copyright © 1998 - 2012.

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 7: Life-Span Development of the Brain and Behavior; Chapter 13: Homeostasis: Active Regulation of Internal States
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 13: Memory, Learning, and Development; Chapter 9: Homeostasis: Active Regulation of the Internal Environment
Link ID: 16237 - Posted: 01.10.2012

By Tom Fields-Meyer, My son Ezra was 4 or 5 when he began asking people their birthdays. At first it seemed like a typical child’s question. But then months later he would encounter acquaintances — or even whole families — and reel off the birth months with perfect recall as he pointed at each person. “Steve, April. Janice, November. Shayna, August.” Driving him to school one morning, I heard him in the back seat reciting what at first sounded like random dates and names. Then I realized what he was doing: listing the months in calendar order, each followed by the names of everyone he had encountered whose birthday fell in that month. It was an early glimpse of what I came to realize was an extraordinary — even superhuman — memory. Ezra, now 15, has high-functioning autism. Experts will tell you that the disorder’s most significant characteristic is difficulty communicating and forming relationships. Ezra knows he has autism, but to him one of its primary characteristics is that he can remember things better than most people. Of course, autism is a spectrum disorder; not every person with the condition has an uncanny memory. Researchers aren’t certain what proportion of people with autism possess powerful recall, nor can they pinpoint exactly what about the brain wiring of people such as Ezra gives them this ability. But many, like Ezra, display remarkable recall that can leave mere mortals floored. © 1996-2011 The Washington Post

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 7: Life-Span Development of the Brain and Behavior; Chapter 17: Learning and Memory
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 13: Memory, Learning, and Development; Chapter 13: Memory, Learning, and Development
Link ID: 16142 - Posted: 12.13.2011

By Rose Eveleth When I was in fifth grade, my brother Alex started correcting my homework. This would not have been weird, except that he was in kindergarten—and autistic. His disorder, characterized by repetitive behaviors and difficulty with social interactions and communication, made it hard for him to listen to his teachers. He was often kicked out of class for not being able to sit for more than a few seconds at a time. Even now, almost 15 years later, he can still barely scratch out his name. But he could look at my page of neatly written words or math problems and pick out which ones were wrong. Many researchers are starting to rethink how much we really know about autistic people and their abilities. These researchers are coming to the conclusion that we might be underestimating what they are capable of contributing to society. Autism is a spectrum disease with two very different ends. At one extreme are “high functioning” people who often hold jobs and keep friends and can get along well in the world. At the other, "low functioning" side are people who cannot operate on their own. Many of them are diagnosed with mental retardation and have to be kept under constant care. But these diagnoses focus on what autistic people cannot do. Now a growing number of scientists are turning that around to look at what autistic people are good at. Researchers have long considered the majority of those affected by autism to be mentally retarded. Although the numbers cited vary, they generally fall between 70 to 80 percent of the affected population. But when Meredyth Edelson, a researcher at Willamette University, went looking for the source of those statistics, she was surprised that she could not find anything conclusive. Many of the conclusions were based on intelligence tests that tend to overestimate disability in autistic people. "Our knowledge is based on pretty bad data," she says. © 2011 Scientific American

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 7: Life-Span Development of the Brain and Behavior; Chapter 1: Biological Psychology: Scope and Outlook
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 13: Memory, Learning, and Development; Chapter 1: An Introduction to Brain and Behavior
Link ID: 16097 - Posted: 12.01.2011

Children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) who attend regular education classes may be more likely to improve their social skills if their typically developing peers are taught how to interact with them than if only the children with ASD are taught such skills. According to a study funded by the National Institutes of Health, a shift away from more commonly used interventions that focus on training children with ASD directly may provide greater social benefits for children with ASD. The study was published online ahead of print on November 30, 2011, in the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry. The most common type of social skills intervention for children with ASD is direct training of a group of children with social challenges, who may have different disorders and may be from different classes or schools. The intervention is usually delivered at a clinic, but may also be school-based and offered in a one-on-one format. Other types of intervention focus on training peers how to interact with classmates who have difficulty with social skills. Both types of intervention have shown positive results in studies, but neither has been shown to be as effective in community settings. Connie Kasari, Ph.D., of the University of California, Los Angeles, and colleagues compared different interventions among 60 children, ages 6-11, with ASD. All of the children were mainstreamed in regular education classrooms for at least 80 percent of the school day.

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 7: Life-Span Development of the Brain and Behavior
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 13: Memory, Learning, and Development
Link ID: 16092 - Posted: 11.29.2011

Cells taken from people with a rare syndrome linked to autism could help explain the origins of the condition, scientists suggest. The Stanford University team turned skin cells from people with "Timothy syndrome" into fully-fledged brain cells. The abnormal activity found in these cells could be partially corrected using an experimental drug, Nature Medicine reports. UK researchers warned the findings might not apply to everyone with autism. Compared with the hundreds of thousands of people worldwide thought to show characteristics of autism, "Timothy syndrome" is vanishingly rare, affecting an estimated 20 people across the planet. People who have the syndrome frequently display autistic behaviour, such as problems with social development and communication. Because it is caused by a single gene defect rather than a combination of small genetic flaws, each making a tiny contribution, it presents a useful target for scientists looking to examine what goes wrong in the developing brain of a child with autism. The US researchers used a technique developed recently to generate brain cells called neurons from only a sample of the patient's skin. BBC © 2011

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 7: Life-Span Development of the Brain and Behavior; Chapter 19: Language and Hemispheric Asymmetry
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 13: Memory, Learning, and Development; Chapter 15: Language and Our Divided Brain
Link ID: 16085 - Posted: 11.29.2011

Ewen Callaway Put two young mice in a cage and they will politely sniff one another. Two rat pups, by contrast, quickly become a blur of fur as they begin some “really rough-and-tumble play”, says Richard Paylor, a neuroscientist at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas. Such behaviour makes rats an ideal animal model for studying autism spectrum disorder, given that children who have the disorder are often less interested in play than children without it. Paylor is one of the first scientists to use transgenic rats to study neurodevelopmental diseases such as autism, and presented his team’s work at the Society for Neuroscience meeting in Washington DC last week. Transgenic rats, Paylor and others say, are a better proxy than mice for the behavioural and cognitive problems experienced by people with autism. And because rats are a preferred model for the pharmaceutical industry, their use in basic research may speed new treatments. “I think they’re the future,” says Joseph Buxbaum, a neuroscientist at the Seaver Autism Center at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York. “I could name 20 high-complexity behavioural tests that you can do in a rat that nobody’s ever done in a mouse.” At the meeting, he debuted his lab’s own transgenic rat strain, which is missing a working copy of a gene called Shank3. People with this same mutation usually develop a neurodevelopmental condition, often autism. © 2011 Nature Publishing Group,

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 7: Life-Span Development of the Brain and Behavior
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 13: Memory, Learning, and Development
Link ID: 16079 - Posted: 11.26.2011

Children with autism have more brain cells and heavier brains compared to typically developing children, according to researchers partly funded by the National Institutes of Health. Published in the Journal of the American Medical Association on Nov. 9, 2011, the small, preliminary study provides direct evidence for possible prenatal causes of autism. "Earlier studies of head circumference and early brain overgrowth have pointed us in this direction, but there have been few quantitative neuroanatomical studies due to the lack of post-mortem tissue from children with autism," said Thomas R. Insel, M.D., director of the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), part of NIH. "These new results, along with an earlier study[1] reporting altered wiring of the prefrontal cortex, focus our attention on this critical area of the brain in autism." The prefrontal cortex is involved in various higher order functions such as language and communication, social behavior, mood, and attention. Children who have autism tend to show deficits in such functions. Eric Courchesne, Ph.D., of the University of San Diego School of Medicine Autism Center of Excellence, and colleagues conducted direct counts of brain cells in specific regions of the prefrontal cortex in postmortem brains of seven boys who had autism and six typically developing males, ranging in age from 2-16 years. Most participants had died in accidents, but the researchers did not base their selection on causes of death.

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 7: Life-Span Development of the Brain and Behavior; Chapter 18: Attention and Higher Cognition
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 13: Memory, Learning, and Development; Chapter 14: Attention and Consciousness
Link ID: 16010 - Posted: 11.08.2011

Sarah C P Williams Most laboratory mice, when meeting new cagemates, will sniff the strangers thoroughly. But the mice in Matthew Anderson's lab instead sit alone, licking their paws repetitively. They ignore other mice, avoid new toys and rarely make noise. Taken together, the abnormalities closely resemble the behavioral symptoms seen in people with autism, a disorder that has been proven difficult to accurately recapitulate in animal models—until recently. “When I first started working on this, I really wondered whether we'd be able to study autism in a mouse,” says Anderson, a neuroscientist at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. “But these mice act just like you would expect with autism. I was pleasantly surprised.” Mouse models for autism first started to emerge around ten years ago. And as researchers have discovered more genes linked to the disease, they have continued to generate more mouse models that are collectively providing the field with a window into the brain structure, neuron function and cellular pathways associated with autism, as well as a platform for testing new drugs. But as more models emerge, it has become increasingly clear that the field needs standardized behavioral assays to compare the effects of the different genetic mutations more clearly. “All these mice have been tested in different labs using different paradigms,” says Daniel Geschwind, a neurogeneticist at the University of California–Los Angeles. “People bandy about repetitive behavior, for example, but what some folks call repetitive behavior is different than what others call repetitive behavior.” © 2011 Nature Publishing Group,

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 7: Life-Span Development of the Brain and Behavior
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 13: Memory, Learning, and Development
Link ID: 15982 - Posted: 11.03.2011

Hannah Waters This past spring, Christian Schaaf sat back and watched seven-year-old Lily play in his office at the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. She looked just like any other girl her age, he recalls, but she didn't seek interaction or even eye contact in the way a child normally would. Instead, she communed with a corner of the room, excitably hopping and flapping her arms as if that spot held a treat too great to bear. Without peering into the file in front of him, Schaaf knew what afflicted Lily. “I've seen enough children that when I see someone with autism, I have a high suspicion for it,” he says. Lily (not her real name) and her mother didn't come to Schaaf's office that day for a diagnosis; a psychiatrist had already detected autism after her fourth birthday. They visited Schaaf, a clinical geneticist, to search her genome using a chromosomal microarray. The technology can find duplications or deletions of small segments of DNA, known as copy-number variants (CNVs), to pinpoint the genetic aberration that might have caused the disorder. Lily's parents hoped that a genetic diagnosis would help them better understand and treat her specific form of autism—and, ultimately, help her get the services she needs to have the best chance at adult independence. Such genetic tests for autism have only become available in the last few years. But, owing to high demand, autism testing has expanded from research centers to private companies. In the US, six companies now offer laboratory-developed tests to doctors that specifically target the developmental disorder, searching the genome for either irregular CNVs or single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) that could explain the symptoms. And these tests aren't cheap: a microarray costs, on average, $1,500, and that's without the bells and whistles such as doctor visits and additional gene sequencing. Although the tests themselves aren't therapeutic, they represent the leading edge of a deeper genetic understanding of autism that could lead to targeted therapies—a market that UK-based research publisher Global Data expects to top $5 billion in the US in 2018, according to an October report. © 2011 Nature Publishing Group,

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 7: Life-Span Development of the Brain and Behavior
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 13: Memory, Learning, and Development
Link ID: 15981 - Posted: 11.03.2011

Meredith Wadman The e-mail that ended one career for Alison Singer, but started another, arrived as she was cooking dinner for her daughters one evening in January 2009. Singer was preoccupied. At a committee meeting she was due to attend in Washington DC the next day, she and others were set to vote on a plan that would direct much of the United States' spending on autism research for the next year. Singer, who had her laptop perched on the kitchen counter, immediately noticed the e-mail from another committee member — a mother who was convinced that vaccines had caused her son's autism. The message proposed last-minute language for inclusion in the plan, endorsing more research into whether vaccines can trigger the disorder of communication and movement. Singer knew immediately that this would cause her serious difficulties. Having read the literature and talked to numerous scientists, she was convinced that no studies supported a link between autism and vaccines. But she was also the top communications executive at Autism Speaks in New York, autism's most prominent research and advocacy group. The organization supports vaccine-related research, and Singer knew that her bosses would expect her to vote for more studies of vaccines as a possible cause of the condition. nature.com/autism At 11:10 p.m., Singer hit 'send' on an e-mail of her own, to Bob and Suzanne Wright, the co-founders of Autism Speaks. "I've concluded that as a matter of personal conscience, I cannot vote in favor of dedicating more funds to vaccine research that has already been undertaken and which I and many others find conclusive," her message read. "I feel compelled to offer my resignation." © 2011 Nature Publishing Group

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 7: Life-Span Development of the Brain and Behavior
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 13: Memory, Learning, and Development
Link ID: 15980 - Posted: 11.03.2011

Lizzie Buchen In the opening scene of The Social Network, Jesse Eisenberg portrays a cold Mark Zuckerberg getting dumped by his girlfriend, who is exasperated by the future Facebook founder's socially oblivious and obsessive personality. Eisenberg's Zuckerberg is the stereotypical Silicon Valley geek — brilliant with technology, pathologically bereft of social graces. Or, in the parlance of the Valley: 'on the spectrum'. Few scientists think that the leaders of the tech world actually have an autism spectrum disorder (ASD), which can range from the profound social, language and behavioural problems that are characteristic of autistic disorder, to the milder Asperger's syndrome. But according to an idea that is creeping into the popular psyche, they and many others in professions such as science and engineering may display some of the characteristics of autism, and have an increased risk of having children with the full-blown disorder. nature.com/autism The roots of this idea can largely be traced to psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen at the University of Cambridge, UK. According to a theory he has been building over the past 15 years, the parents of autistic children, and the children themselves, have an aptitude for understanding and analysing predictable, rule-based systems — think machines, mathematics or computer programs. And the genes that endow parents with minds suited to technical tasks, he hypothesizes, could lead to autism when passed on to their children, especially when combined with a dose of similar genes from a like-minded mate1. © 2011 Nature Publishing Group,

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 7: Life-Span Development of the Brain and Behavior; Chapter 12: Sex: Evolutionary, Hormonal, and Neural Bases
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 13: Memory, Learning, and Development; Chapter 8: Hormones and Sex
Link ID: 15979 - Posted: 11.03.2011

Karen Weintraub When Leo Kanner first described autism in 1943, he based his observations on 11 children with severe communication problems, repetitive behaviours such as rocking and an acute lack of social interaction. The physician and psychiatrist at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, predicted that there were probably many more cases than he or anyone else had noticed1. "These characteristics form a unique 'syndrome', not heretofore reported," he wrote, "which seems to be rare enough, yet is probably more frequent than is indicated by the paucity of observed cases." Kanner's prophecy has been more than fulfilled. An early study2, in 1966, examined eight- to ten-year-old schoolchildren in Middlesex, UK, and estimated a prevalence of 4.5 cases per 10,000 children. By 1992, 19 in every 10,000 six-year-old Americans were being diagnosed as autistic3. Numbers skyrocketed in the first decade of the twenty-first century, according to data from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta, Georgia. Surveying what is now known as autism spectrum disorder (ASD), the CDC found that by 2006, more than 90 in 10,000 eight-year-olds in the United States had autism4. Put another way, autism was now affecting 1 in every 110 children — a figure that strengthened public fears that an 'epidemic' was afoot (see 'Diagnosis: rising'). © 2011 Nature Publishing Group

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 7: Life-Span Development of the Brain and Behavior
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 13: Memory, Learning, and Development
Link ID: 15978 - Posted: 11.03.2011