A brain imaging study of 26 mouse models of autism reveals a broad range of structural abnormalities. The models cluster into groups with similar features, reports a study published 9 September in Molecular Psychiatry.
A method for measuring myelin, the protective sheath around neurons, indicates that there is less of it in the brains of people with autism than in those of controls.
A brain hub responsible for higher-order tasks may be overly connected in autism and thinly connected in attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.
A new technique helps researchers trace the nerve fibers that connect brain regions by revealing how the fibers physically relate to curves and folds on the brain’s surface. The method was described 8 July in Medical Image Analysis.
A teenage girl with Rett syndrome has a mutation in WFR45, a gene that is mutated in people who abruptly lose motor and mental skills in adulthood, according to a study published 13 March in the Journal of Human Genetics.
Male and female preschoolers with autism have distinct sets of brain regions that distinguish them from typically developing controls, according to unpublished research presented Saturday at the 2014 International Meeting for Autism Research in Atlanta.
Thought until recently to only coordinate motor skills, the cerebellum is involved in diverse cognitive functions such as language and social interaction, and may play a role in autism, says Emanuel DiCicco-Bloom.
Even small differences in head motion between groups can substantially increase group differences in brain imaging scans. This underscores the importance of accounting for head motion in any study in which one population is likely to move more than another, says Kami Koldewyn.
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.
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.