Three studies published over the past two months have found significant evidence that children and adolescents with autism have brains that are overly connected compared with the brains of controls. The findings complicate the theory that autism is fundamentally characterized by weakly connected brain regions.
How can we characterize what is atypical when we don’t fully understand what typical brain development looks like, particularly under the age of 5? Christine Wu Nordahl explains the importance of scanning the brains of typically developing children.
By creating an atlas of 39 different areas in the mouse cerebellum, researchers have highlighted differences in this region in three mouse models of autism, they reported 22 October in Autism Research.
Researchers have developed a new way to perform high-resolution microscopy in a moving, changing organism, they reported in November in Nature Biotechnology. They used the method to follow the development of a live embryo and its brain.
A large, multisite dataset of brain scans identifies autism with 60 percent accuracy, much lower than the numbers cited by single-site studies. The study, published 25 September in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, highlights the vast differences in equipment, quality and methods across sites.
A difference in how auditory nerve fibers develop may explain why children with autism process sounds more slowly than typically developing children do. The result, published in September in Brain Research, also suggests that a widely used method for assessing nerve fiber structure may not be appropriate for autism research.
A small, customized magnetoencephalography device records signals in children’s brains better than the typical adult-sized machine does, reports a study published 8 October in Molecular Autism.
When people with autism consider scenarios that require them to infer others’ thoughts and beliefs, scans show no difference between their brain activation and that of controls, according to a study published 20 September in PLoS One.
A packed week of research at the 2013 Society for Neuroscience annual meeting in San Diego brought a flurry of breaking news and a creative combination of emerging research tools.
A new technique allows researchers to track the movement of a molecule along a single neuron’s projections. The technique, adapted for zebrafish, was presented Monday at the 2013 Society for Neuroscience annual meeting in San Diego.