Article: Scanning Babies for Autism

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Scanning Babies for Autism

•By SHIRLEY S. WANG

By taking scans of sleeping children, researchers are discovering what occurs in

the brains of babies and young children with autism.

Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI, to peer at images of the

children's brains, researchers from the University of California, San Diego,

found that autistic children as young as 14 months use different brain regions

than youngsters with more typical development when hearing bedtime stories.

The findings suggest that even very early on, the brains of those with autism

work differently than typical babies. They also help explain why failure of

language comprehension is a " red flag " for babies with autism, according to the

study's author, Courchesne, director of the UCSD Autism Center of

Excellence.

Getty Images

The brains of babies with autism function differently.

Facts About Autism

•Autism affects about 1 in 110 children and is characterized by sometimes-severe

social impairment and problems with language.

•The condition has puzzled researchers; its cause or causes are not clear.

•A new study found that when babies and toddlers with autism process language,

only their right brain is active. Their typically developing peers use both

right and left regions of the brain.

•Researchers theorize that the two sides of autistic brains don't communicate

well, and the right side compensates for lack of activity in the left.

•Autism is usually diagnosed at 2 or 3 years old.

Source: WSJ reporting

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The small study of 43 subjects, believed to be the first to examine the brains

of young children with autism and related disorders, was presented at the

International Meeting for Autism Research in Philadelphia last week.

This type of work " is going to tell us an awful lot about how the brain goes

wrong in the first place and then gives us insight into how we'll be able to

help at an earlier age, " says Dr. Courchesne.

Learning when and where brain changes occur can also help rule out some

suspected causes of autism. For instance, if brain differences are already

present at birth, then environmental toxins or vaccine exposure in childhood

can't be responsible, according to Dr. Courchesne.

Regular MRIs examine the structure of the brain, but by asking subjects to

perform a task in the scanner, an fMRI can examine brain function through blood

flow and response in response to neural activity. Unlike X-rays, they don't use

radiation.

But scientists have had trouble figuring out how to get young children to lie

still in the noisy, claustrophobic brain scanners. The UCSD group came up with a

solution: Put babies and children in the scanner in the wee hours of the night

when they are naturally asleep.

For their study, the researchers first had to find children with autism-spectrum

disorders. UCSD recruited 150 pediatricians in and around San Diego to screen

16,000 babies to find nearly 100 who appeared to their doctors to have autism or

related disorders.

The researchers brought 23 young children ranging from age 13 months to nearly 4

years old with autism-spectrum disorders, and 20 typically developing kids to

the lab at nighttime when the children were already asleep.

While the children were in the scanner, researchers played a repeating tape of a

female voice reading a bedtime story and the scanner recorded the children's

brain activity. (Dr. Courchesne's lab has shown in a separate, published study

of older children that even when children sleep, they hear and react to

language.)

This study showed that in the typically developing babies, both the right and

left temporal regions of the brain†" parts that help us understand different

aspects of language†" were activated. In older children, there was evidence that

the left side became even more active compared with the right side.

But in the babies and children with autism-spectrum disorders the use of the

right brain was far stronger.

The left temporal region of the brain usually deals with understanding the

meaning of words, in a " dictionary " manner, he says. The right side helps us

understand social language based on context, like how people sound when they are

angry rather than happy, even if they're speaking the same words.

One theory is that in autism, the right side is needed to learn the basic

definitions of words, crowding out the ability to develop skills to process more

social, nuanced aspects of language, Dr. Courchesne says.

The research could one day help clinicians diagnose children more reliably and

younger than 2 or 3 years old, the age when they currently are consistently

diagnosed, according to Mandell, a psychiatry and pediatrics professor at

University of Pennsylvania and scientific chair of the autism meeting, who

wasn't involved with the study.

Drs. Courchesne and Mandell say that the scanning technique isn't ready for that

yet.

Write to Shirley Wang at shirley.wang@...

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