What Part Of The Brain Does Autism Affect

What Part Of The Brain Does Autism Affect – Autism is now recognized as a diverse group of developmental disorders, known as autism spectrum disorders, or ASD. It is defined behaviorally and its three defining characteristics are known: alteration of social interaction, communication difficulties and repetitive behaviours.

Like a computer, the brain relies on intricate wiring to process and transmit information. Scientists have found that in people with autism, this wiring is faulty, causing communication problems between brain cells.

What Part Of The Brain Does Autism Affect

In the brain, nerve cells transmit important messages that regulate body functions, from social behavior to movement. Imaging studies have revealed that children with autism have too many nerve fibers, but they don’t work well enough to facilitate communication between various parts of the brain.

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Brain imaging techniques, such as magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), have been used to examine the brains of people with autism. However, the results were inconsistent. Abnormal brain areas in people with autism include:

Scientists have also discovered irregularities in the brain structures themselves, such as the corpus callosum (which facilitates communication between the two hemispheres of the brain), the amygdala (which influences emotions and social behavior) and the cerebellum (which is involved in motor activity). . activity, balance and coordination). They believe that these abnormalities occur during prenatal development.

In addition, scientists noticed imbalances in neurotransmitters, chemicals that help nerve cells communicate with each other. Two of the neurotransmitters that appear to be affected are serotonin (which influences emotions and behavior) and glutamate (which plays a role in neuron activity). Together, these brain differences may explain autistic behaviors. UC San Francisco researchers found that children with sensory processing disorders have decreased structural brain connections in specific sensory regions different from autism, further establishing SPD as a clinically important neurodevelopmental disorder.

The research, published in the journal PLOS ONE, is the first study to compare structural connectivity in the brains of children diagnosed with autism versus those diagnosed with SPD and a group of typically developing children. This new research follows the groundbreaking study published in 2013, the first to find that children with SPD have quantifiable regional differences in brain structure compared to typically developing children. This work showed a biological basis for the disorder but raised the question of how these differences compare with other neurodevelopmental disorders.

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“With more than 1% of children in the United States diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder and between 5 and 16% of children with sensory processing difficulties, it is critical to define the neural basis of these conditions and identify areas where they overlap and where they overlap they are very distinct,” said lead author Pratik Mukherjee, MD, PhD, professor of radiology, biomedical imaging and bioengineering at the .

SPD can be difficult to detect, as more than 90% of children with autism have atypical sensory behaviors, and SPD does not appear in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual used by psychiatrists and psychologists.

“One of the most surprising new findings is that children with SPD show even greater brain disconnection than children with a full diagnosis of autism in some sensory tracts,” said Elysa Marco, MD, a child cognitive and behavioral neurologist at Benioff Children’s Hospital. San Francisco and the corresponding author of the study. “However, children with autism, but not those with SPD, showed impairment in brain connections essential for processing facial emotions and memory.”

Children with SPD have difficulty processing stimulation, which can cause a wide variety of symptoms, including hypersensitivity to sound, sight, and touch, poor motor skills, and being easily distracted. Some SPD children cannot tolerate the noise of a vacuum cleaner, while others cannot hold a pencil or have difficulty with emotional regulation. Also, a sound that is irritating one day may be tolerated the next. According to the researchers, the condition can be confusing for parents and has been a source of much controversy for doctors who debate whether it constitutes a disorder in its own right.

How Does Autism Affect The Brain And Nervous System?

“However, these children often do not receive support services at school or in the community because SPD is not yet a recognized condition,” Marco said. “We are starting to catch up with what the parents already knew; Sensory challenges are real and can be measured both in the lab and in the real world. Our next challenge is to find out why children have SPD and to transfer these findings from the laboratory to the clinic.”

In the study, the researchers used an advanced form of magnetic resonance imaging called diffusion tensor imaging (DTI), which measures the microscopic movement of water molecules inside the brain to provide information about the brain’s white matter tracts. The brain’s white matter constitutes the “wiring” that connects different areas of the brain and is therefore essential for perceiving, thinking and acting. DTI shows the direction of white matter fibers and the integrity of white matter, thereby mapping the structural connections between brain regions.

The study examined the structural connectivity of specific white matter tracts in 16 children with SPD and 15 boys with autism between the ages of 8 and 12 and compared them to 23 boys in the same age range.

The researchers found that both the SPD and autism groups showed decreased connectivity in multiple parieto-occipital tracts, the areas that handle basic sensory information in the back of the brain. However, only the autism group showed damage to the inferior fronto-occipital fascicles (IFOF), inferior longitudinal fascicles (ILF), fusiform-amygdala tracts, and fusiform-hippocampal tracts, tracts critical for socioemotional processing.

Co Occurrence Of Apraxia In Autism

“One of the classic features of autism is decreased eye gaze and decreased ability to read facial emotions,” Marco said. “The impairment of this specific brain connectivity not only differentiates the autistic group from the SPD group, but reflects the difficulties that autism patients have in the real world. In our work, the more disconnected these regions are, the greater the challenge they face with social skills.”

Thanks to pioneering work at Benioff Children’s Hospital in San Francisco, a biological basis for SPD has been discovered. There is a lot of work to be done and there is a funding gap. We still have to:

You can pioneer a new era of research and sensory therapies by supporting the scientific sensory processing team at ‘.

Children with isolated SPD showed less connectivity in the brain’s basic perception and integration tracts that serve as connections for the auditory, visual, and somatosensory (tactile) systems involved in sensory processing.

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“If we can start by measuring a child’s brain connectivity and see how that manifests in their functional abilities, then we can use that measurement as a metric for the success of our interventions and see if the connectivities are changing based on our clinical interventions.” Marco said. “Larger studies are clearly needed to replicate this initial work, but we are encouraged that DTI can be a powerful clinical and research tool for understanding the basis of neurodevelopmental sensory differences.”

Study co-authors are Yi-Shin Chang, BSE, MS, Julia Owen, PhD, Shivani Desai, BS, Susanna Hill, BS, Anne Arnett, MA, and Julia Harris, BS, all.

The research was supported by the Wallace Research Foundation, the Gates Family Foundation, and the Holcombe Kawaja Family Foundation. The authors reported that they have no conflicts of interest relevant to the contents of this paper that must be disclosed.

Is the nation’s leading university focused exclusively on health. Now celebrating the 150th anniversary of its founding as a medical school, it is committed to transforming health worldwide through advanced biomedical research, graduate education in the life sciences and health professions, and excellence in patient care. It includes top-tier graduate schools in dentistry, medicine, nursing, and pharmacy; a graduate division with world-renowned life sciences programs, a major biomedical research enterprise, and two world-class hospitals, San Francisco Medical Center and Benioff Children’s Hospital. The causes of autism are environmental or genetic factors that predispose an individual to develop autism, also known as autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Many causes of autism have been proposed, but understanding the causal theory of autism is incomplete.

What Is Autism?

ASD is a neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by impairments in communication skills and social interaction, and by limited/repetitive behaviors, interests, or activities that are inappropriate for the individual’s developmental stage. The severity of symptoms and functional impairment varies from individual to individual.

There are many known environmental, genetic, and biological causes of autism. Research indicates that genetic factors are predominant in the onset of autism; however, the inheritance of autism is complex and many of the genetic interactions involved are unknown.

Different underlying brain dysfunctions are thought to cause the common symptoms of autism, just as completely different brain types cause intellectual disability.

In recent years, the prevalence and number of people diagnosed with the disease has increased dramatically. There are many possible reasons for this occurrence, especially changes in the diagnostic criteria for autism.

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Environmental factors thought to contribute to autism or exacerbate its symptoms, or that may be important to consider in future research, include certain foods,

Infectious diseases, heavy metals, solvents, diesel

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