The development of white matter tracts, the nerve bundles that join one brain region to another, is different in babies who go on to develop autism compared with those who do not, according to a study published 17 February in the American Journal of Psychiatry.
A new website invites the public to help map the ‘connectome,’ the pattern of connections among all the neurons in our brain.
Structural connections in the brain’s face-processing region can be used to predict brain activity in response to faces, according to research published this month in Nature Neuroscience.
The brains of men and women with Asperger syndrome are more similar than are those of male and female controls, according to a study published in the January issue of the American Journal of Neuroradiology. The results lend support to the ‘extreme male brain’ theory of autism, the researchers say.
Analyzing the organization of whole-brain structural networks could reveal differences in the way brains of children with autism and other neurodevelopmental disorders are wired.
Head movements taint the results of many brain imaging studies, particularly those analyzing children or individuals with developmental disorders, according to two sobering new studies.
A mouse model of Rett syndrome that mimics a mutation seen in people shows many features of the disorder, such as hand clasping, according to a study published 27 November in Nature Neuroscience.
Individuals with autism-linked variants of a language gene use regions in the brain’s right hemisphere, rather than the left, to process language, according to a study published 10 October in The American Journal of Medical Genetics Part B.
In the brains of some individuals with autism, chemical changes to histones, proteins entwined with DNA, tend to show up near genes linked to the disorder, according to a study published 7 November in the Archives of General Psychiatry.
The etiology of autism may be best understood as an impairment of neuronal circuits, specifically interneurons that dampen signals in the brain, says neuroscientist Gordon Fishell.