Researchers at the University of California, Davis, M.I.N.D. Institute have discovered that the brains of males with autism have fewer neurons in the amygdala//, a part of the brain involved in emotion and memory.

David Amaral, research director of the UC Davis M.I.N.D. Institute, and former graduate student Cynthia Mills Schumann counted and measured representative samples of neurons in the amygdala of nine postmortem brains of males who had autism and 10 postmortem brains of males who did not have autism. Both subject groups ranged in age from 10-to-44 years at the time of death. Using a technique known as “unbiased stereological analysis,” Schumann and Amaral counted neurons using a computer-aided microscope system. They found significantly fewer neurons – cells responsible for creating and transmitting electrical impulses – in the whole amygdala and its lateral nucleus in the brains of people with autism.

“This is the first quantitative evidence of an abnormal number of neurons in the autistic amygdala and the first study to use modern unbiased sampling techniques for autism research,” Amaral said.

“While we have known that autism is a developmental brain disorder, where, how and when the autistic brain develops abnormally has been a mystery,” said Thomas R. Insel, a physician and director of the National Institute of Mental Health. “This new finding is important because it demonstrates that the structure of the amygdala is abnormal in autism. Along with other findings on the abnormal function of the amygdala, research is beginning to narrow the search for the brain basis of autism.”

Now affecting 1 in every 166 children and primarily affecting males, autism is a lifelong neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by social and communication deficits. While autism has clear behavioral indicators, the neural alterations leading to the deficits have been difficult to pinpoint. In studies dating back to the mid-1980s,
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