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.
Synesthesia, a condition in which people mix up different types of sensory stimuli, is nearly three times as common in adults with autism as in the general population, reports a study published 20 November in Molecular Autism.
Studies at the level of neural circuits are needed to better understand the importance of both increased and decreased connectivity between different regions in the autism brain, say John Rubenstein and Vikaas Sohal.
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.
Emerging findings in children with autism are showing both hyperconnectivity and underconnectivity in different regions and circuits throughout the brain.
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.
Researchers have produced images of connectivity during resting-state activation, which occurs while individuals are resting quietly in a scanner, in mouse brains. The new technique was presented Monday at the 2013 Society for Neuroscience annual meeting in San Diego.
Boys with tuberous sclerosis complex, an autism-related disorder, have more disorganized nerve fibers in some regions of the brain than do girls with the disorder, according to unpublished work presented Sunday at the 2013 Society for Neuroscience annual meeting in San Diego.
Two new studies bolster the emerging idea that microglia, cells that were long dismissed as passive soldiers of the brain’s immune system, are in fact actively involved in shoring up connections between neurons. The unpublished work was presented Sunday at the 2013 Society for Neuroscience annual meeting in San Diego.
Deletion of a gene in 22q11.2, a chromosomal region linked to autism and schizophrenia, leads to small head size in mice, according to research presented Saturday at the 2013 Society for Neuroscience annual meeting in San Diego. Mice with a large deletion in this region show disrupted brain connections, and struggle with learning and memory.