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News › UA researchers help devise autism test
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UA researchers help devise autism test
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Posted by lightfoot on Wednesday, February 27, 2008 (19:28:22)
By Adam Jones
Diagnosing autism early in a child’s life can be difficult and is usually done by observation and conversation with parents.
Researchers have been looking for some sort of measurable, distinguishable trait in the brain to show some degree of the neurological disorder, and a team of researchers from the Baylor College of Medicine and the University of Alabama believe they found one.
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In a paper published in the scientific journal Neuron, the researchers write that in high-functioning autistic teenagers, the part of the brain that helps people understand how their actions affect others was essentially inactive during a task where the brains of non-autistic teenagers lit up the scans.
And unlike many earlier brain-imaging studies that showed traits having some overlap between autistic and non-austic people, the pattern of activity is nearly uniform in its appearance or absence, said Mark Klinger, associate professor of psychology at UA and co-author of the paper.
The study also found that the amount of activity in the section of the brain was tied to the severity of the participant’s autism.
“We were absolutely stunned to see such a large effect in this study,†said Laura Klinger, director of UA’s Autism Spectrum Disorders Research Clinic and co-author of the paper. “It suggests that we are really onto something.â€Â
The finding came from a unique brain imaging process created at Baylor called hyperscanning, which allows the imaging of two brains at the same time while they interact with each other. UA supplied the autistic teenagers and taught them to perform the tasks necessary to trigger the brain activity.
“We are very excited about the usefulness of the hyperscanning technology and economic games as new tools to probe autism. Our hope is that these same approaches can be used to probe a wide range of psychopathologies,†said Dr. Pearl Chiu, first author on the study and an assistant professor in the departments of neuroscience and psychiatry at Baylor College of Medicine.
Participants played an economic trust game. The first person was given money in a computer game, then told to give some, none or all to the second person. The money given was tripled, and the second person decided whether to give any back to the first person. If both trust each other, they will maximize the cash they take away.
The autistic teenagers got roughly the same results, but they didn’t use the same part of the brain.
It’s not known exactly what they thought while playing the game  no scan can show that  but its clear they weren’t thinking the same way about how their actions affected the other person, Laura Klinger said.
The high-functioning autistic group probably used some other part of the brain to compensate, and the next step is finding what part of the brain that was, she said.
Beyond that, a simpler task needs to be found so the test can be taken by younger children and, ultimately, babies. A task that has shown some promise in triggering the same brain activity is showing the person being tested pictures of himself along with pictures of others, Mark Klinger said.
Even if the test keeps performing well in confirming diagnosis, it years away from being used outside the lab and likely would never be used as the sole way of diagnosing autism, Laura Klinger said.
“We’re not ready to use it in the real world, but it gives us information about where to look in the brain and the kind of difficulties these people go through,†she said.
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Posted by lightfoot on Wednesday, February 27, 2008 (19:28:22) (660 reads)
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