Autistic in Biological News

UNC, Caltech research finds further evidence for genetic contribution to autism

... of us and in a way that is strikingly similar to autistic patients themselves, according to new research by ... for the hypothesis that the parents with the autistic child have brains that function somewhat ... emotions and may have abnormal volume in both autistic individuals and their nonautistic siblings. ...

Autism Speaks collaborates on grant with the Allen Institute for Brain Science and autism expert

... grant that will examine the architecture of the autistic brain. Led by Eric Courchesne, Ph.D., Professor ... underlying cellular and molecular defects in the autistic brain. An extensive study of this type has never ... early brain overgrowth very likely triggers autistic behavior in infants and toddlers, and so the next ...

New studies suggest brain overgrowth in 1-year-olds linked to development of autism

... infants first year may contribute to the onset of autistic characteristics, according to research presented ... research which has found brain overgrowth in autistic children as young as two years old. Lead ... of autism among children, so the ways in which autistic children develop and are affected by brain growth ...

Study finds first-ever genetic animal model of autism

... better understand abnormal brain function in autistic humans, which could help them identify and ... we can study changes in the brain that lead to autistic behaviors and symptoms, which may help us ... may resemble the enhanced cognitive abilities in autistic savants (people who have a severe developmental ...

New studies on schizophrenia, depression, trauma and autism highlight annual meeting

... infants first year may contribute to the onset of autistic characteristics. These findings support concurrent research which has found brain overgrowth in autistic children as young as two years old. (Embargoed ... better understand abnormal brain function in autistic humans, which could help them identify and ...

Autism Speaks funds $5 million to studies on genetic and environmental risk factors for autism

... brain and behavioral changes in very early life that may mark the onset of autistic symptoms. Little is known about the abnormal processes during early brain ... in brain volume and neural circuitry concurrent with the emergence of autistic behavior," explained Dr. Piven Professor of Psychiatry and Director of the ...

UNC expands brain imaging study of infants at risk for autism

... to examine changes in their brains and behavior that may mark the onset of autistic symptoms is being substantially expanded after receiving an additional ... prospectively measure, in the same group of infants, both the onset of autistic symptoms and brain enlargement that may co-occur at the end of the first ...

Researchers find link between nicotine addiction and autism

... and we had nicotinic receptors that had disappeared in the brains of autistic patients. Our finding filled a gap by saying there is a physical and ... perhaps increasing receptors in tobacco addicts while decreasing them in autistic individuals, thus increasing susceptibility to these devastating ...

UT Health Science Center researchers study diet and autism

... studies to determine whether gluten and dairy products play a role in autistic behavior as parents have anecdotally claimed. The pilot study is one of ... granted by the Department of Pediatrics, researchers will enroll 38 autistic children ages 3 to 9. They will look at the influence of gluten and milk ...

Researchers move 2 steps closer to understanding genetic underpinnings of autism

... Our previous finding of association between loss of CNTNAP2 function and autistic behavior has been validated in the general population. This is a very ... study of these four patients uncovered the association between CNTNAP2 and autistic behaviors. From that small beginning, CNTNAP2 has now been implicated as a ...

Rutgers Genetics receives $7.8 million for autism research

... The samples will be collected from 2,000 families that have a single autistic child. The Simons Simplex Collection, as this project is known, will ... development and is usually diagnosed in the first three years of life. autistic children typically have difficulties with behavior, social interaction and ...

Further gene mutations linked to autism risk

... ASDs is complex and remains poorly understood. The researchers compared genetic samples of 3,832 individuals from 912 families with multiple autistic children against genetic samples of 1,070 disease-free children. Besides the identification of 27 regions harboring rare variants in children with ...

MIT: Why we have difficulty recognizing faces in photo negatives

... that people with autism tend to focus on the mouths of people they are looking at, rather than the eyes, so the new findings could help explain why autistic people have such difficulty recognizing faces, says Sinha. The findings also suggest that neuronal responses in the brain may be based on these ...

Science returns to the Capitol Hill spotlight at March 24 exhibition

... Margaret Glass Coalition for Academic Scientific Computation, HPC Goes Green, Sue Fratkin Computing Research Association, Computing Aids for autistic Children, Greg Abowd, Georgia Institute of Technology Consortium for Ocean Leadership, Ocean Observatories & Scientific Ocean Drilling, Tim ...

Musicians have biological advantage in identifying emotion in sound

... processing disorders may benefit from musical experience," says Kraus. Strait, a pianist and oboe player who formerly worked as a therapist with autistic children, goes a step further. Noting that impaired emotional perception is a hallmark of autism and Asberger's syndromes, she suggests that musical ...

Study shows California's autism increase not due to better counting, diagnosis

... more than 44 in 10,000 for children born in 2000. Some have argued that this change could have been due to migration into California of families with autistic children, inclusion of children with milder forms of autism in the counting and earlier ages of diagnosis as consequences of improved surveillance or ...

Unusual use of toys in infancy a clue to later autism

... researcher Sally Ozonoff, first author of the current study, which was published in the October issue of Autism , the journal of the National autistic Society. The American Academy of Pediatrics has recommended that all infants be screened for autism twice before their second birthdays. ...

The Rett Syndrome Research Trust launches operations

... Institute Investigator. She is particularly interested in the growing number of clinical presentations of MECP2 spectrum disorders, which include autistic profiles, and their molecular underpinnings. She comments on the relevance of this work to conditions beyond classic Rett Syndrome: "Rett Syndrome ...

Researchers study facial structures, brain abnormalities to reveal formula for detection of autism

... assistant in Duan's computer graphics lab, MU senior and Goldwater Scholar. "Using the 3-D representations, we are comparing the brain structures of autistic children to those of non-autistic children; no one has ever done that." Duan's facial and brain imaging work will focus on two ASD subgroups ...

The first autism disease genes

... The autistic disorder, a neurodevelopmental disease first described in 1943, represents a challenge for treatment and a puzzle for research. Alongside Asperger ...

Children with autism don't adapt as readily to unfamiliar faces

... or Jim-like faces on their rightful team. But the improvement in recognition was much smaller for children with autism. The findings suggest that autistic children don't update their perceptions in the way typically developing children do. "Since faces are important for interpersonal communication, ...

'The eyes have it' -- Autism research yields surprising results

... autistic children are able to interpret the mental state ... previous studies, psychologists found that autistic children can ‘read?a stranger’s mental state based on that person’s eyes. autistic children have long been thought to be poor at ...

When nerve cells can't make contact

... that similar malfunctions are experienced by autistic patients. Autism is one of the most common ... the disease is accompanied by mental disability. autistic individuals exhibiting high intelligence or ... - the probability that the identical twin of an autistic person will also ...

Autistic brain has fewer neurons for processing emotion

... For the first time, research has shown that the autistic brain has fewer neurons in an area related to ... neurons in the amygdala of nine postmortem autistic male brains and 10 age-matched male postmortem ... that there are ultimately fewer neurons in the autistic amygdala," says Schumann. Schumann suggests ...

Brain activity related to processing faces is similar in people with, without autism

... finding is surprising, as it is widely known that autistic individuals tend to avoid looking directly at ... gyrus, activated almost identically in our autistic study participants and the control group of ... generation of actions show deficits in autistic individuals. In addition, we wanted to see if ...

'Shifty-eyed' Monkeys Offer Window Into Brain's Social Reflexes

... treatments for autism and better methods to teach autistic children. The researchers, post-doctoral ... Such deficits not only cause problems for autistic children in everyday social interactions, said ... Platt. 'You often don't see that capability in autistic individuals.' To understand the neural functions ...

A frown or a smile? Children with autism can't discern

... active; with the averted-gaze pictures, it quieted down. In contrast, the autistic children showed no activity in this region of the brain whether they were ... key role of eye gaze in signaling communicative intent, it also shows that autistic children, even when gazing directly into someone’s eyes, don’t recognize ...

Newborn brains grow vision and movement regions first

... implications for autism research, Gilmore said. Children with autism have larger brains and more gray matter than average. The study suggests that in autistic children, something may go awry during gray matter growth in the first year of life, he said. "Too much gray matter may be just as bad as too little ...

Autism gene identified by researchers at Yale working with a global research consortium

... these are the preliminary findings from the AGP’s first phase. The consortium used "gene chip" technology to look for genetic similarities in autistic individuals culled from almost 1,200 families. They also scanned the DNA to search for copy number variations, which are submicroscopic insertions ...

Brain regions do not communicate efficiently in adults with autism

... which is impaired in many people with autism. A global pattern of decreased neural connectivity between the frontal lobes and the rest of autistic brain showed up on the alpha wave band. These findings support several other studies using functional magnetic resonance imaging and positron ...

Carnegie Mellon researchers discover key deficiencies in brains of people with autism

... relationship between the language and visuospatial systems of the brain, the team used fMRI scans to view the patterns of activation in the brains of autistic and normal participants while they read a series of sentences to determine whether each one was true or false. The sentences either had high imagery ...

Complex gene interactions account for autism risk

... encode portions of the GABA receptor in 470 Caucasian families. Of those families, 266 included more than one person with autism and 204 included one autistic individual. The team tested for associations between particular gene variants and the disease. They also applied sophisticated statistical methods ...