Autism
Home videos of infants' movements can be used to help detect a form of autism in a child's first year of life, years earlier than the disorder typically is identified, researchers have discovered.
The key to detecting Asperger's syndrome, a milder yet little-understood form of autism, lies in analyzing infants' movements rather than waiting for them to reveal the disorder through social behavior in school or later in adulthood, according to a husband-and-wife team at the University of Florida.
Researchers have found transferring a single gene, the vasopressin receptor, into the brain's reward center makes a promiscuous male meadow vole monogamous. This finding, which appears in the June 17 issue of Nature, may help better explain the neurobiology of romantic love as well as disorders of the ability to form social bonds, such as autism. In addition, the finding supports previous research linking social bond formation with drug addiction, also associated with the reward center of the brain.
Contrary to popular fears that half of autistic children will never speak, new findings by the University of Michigan show just 14 percent of autistic children are unable to talk by age 9 and 40 percent can speak fluently. Early intervention leads to better treatment, said Catherine Lord, director of the U-M Autism and Communication Disorders Center. The center has been conducting a sweeping longitudinal study of children with autistic spectrum disorders (ASD) that started when participants were age 2 and followed them over many years with most of that subject group now in their teens.
A new study indicates that postnatal exposure to thimerosal, a mercury preservative commonly used in a number of childhood vaccines, can lead to the development of autism-like damage in autoimmune disease susceptible mice. This animal model, the first to show that the administration of low-dose ethylmercury can lead to behavioral and neurological changes in the developing brain, reinforces previous studies showing that a genetic predisposition affects risk in combination with certain environmental triggers.
Specialist individual music lessons could hugely benefit children with autism, according to researchers Dr Pamela Heaton and Dr Francesca Happe at the University of London. The study, which was funded by ESRC, suggests that many children with this disorder have outstanding abilities in tone recognition. ''A lot of work has been done on musical savants with exceptional musical memory and rarely found absolute pitch ability'' says Dr Pamela Heaton who led the research. ''But our research shows that even children without these special talents and no musical training can have highly developed musical 'splinter skills'. If we could develop effective non-verbal music teaching methods, we might be able to understand more about the way these children learn and process other information.''
Based on a thorough review of clinical and epidemiological studies, neither the mercury-based vaccine preservative thimerosal nor the measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine are associated with autism, says a new report from the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies. Furthermore, the hypotheses regarding how the MMR vaccine and thimerosal could trigger autism lack supporting evidence and are theoretical only. Further research to find the cause of autism should be directed toward other lines of inquiry that are supported by current knowledge and evidence and offer more promise for providing an answer, said the committee that wrote the report.
Researchers say they have strongly linked a specific gene with autism. While earlier studies have found rare genetic mutations in single families, a study published in the April issue of the American Journal of Psychiatry is the first to identify a gene that increases susceptibility to autism in a broad population. Approximately 1 in 1,000 people have autism or autistic disorder. It appears to be the most highly genetic of all psychiatric disorders. If a family with one autistic child has another child the chance that this child would be autistic is 50 to 100 times more likely to than would be expected by chance.
The reward mechanism involved in addiction appears to regulate lifelong social or pair bonds between monogamous mating animals, according to a Center for Behavioral Neuroscience (CBN) study of prairie voles published in the January 19 edition of the Journal of Comparative Neurology. The finding could have implications for understanding the basis of romantic love and disorders of the ability to form social attachments, such as autism and schizophrenia.
Neurobiologists at Duke University Medical Center have found the strongest evidence yet that monkeys show the same keen "social reflexes" that humans do -- shifting their attention in response to the direction of gaze of another individual. The researchers said their findings mean that monkeys can provide a critically important animal model of how the brain controls what humans pay attention to in social situations.
Researchers have developed a new statistical genetic "fishing net" that they have cast into a sea of complex genetic data on autistic children to harvest an elusive autism gene.
Moreover, the researchers said that the success of the approach will be broadly applicable to studying genetic risk factors for other complex genetic diseases, such as hypertension, diabetes and multiple sclerosis. In this case, the gene, which encodes part of a brain neurotransmitter docking station called the gamma-Aminobutyric Acid Receptor beta3-subunit (GABRB3), has been implicated in autism previously, but never positively linked to the disease. Their findings will be published in the March 2003 issue of the American Journal of Human Genetics.
Researchers in Los Angeles have localized a region on chromosome 16 that is likely to contain a risk gene for Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, the most prevalent childhood-onset psychiatric disorder. The scientists say their finding suggest that the suspected risk gene may contribute as much as 30 percent of the underlying genetic cause of ADHD and may also be involved in a separate childhood onset disorder, autism.
