Autism is a serious mental disorder that affects the ability to communicate and interact. The core features of autism are social communication and interaction impairments and repetitive behaviors. 1 out of 68 infants are diagnosed with autism, though males are more likely (1 out of 42). The average age of diagnoses of autism is usually around 3 years since earlier ages are unreliable.
In Dr. Maggie Guy’s presentation, she mainly focused on the brain activity during face processing in infant siblings of children with autism (ASIB) and fragile X syndrome (FXS). In order to see this relationship, she measured the N290 response to faces and toys. In her research, she had 12 months old infants that were either from ASIB, FXS, or typically developing low risk “control” infants. In the experiment, these infants were then seated on the mother’s lap in a dark room, and EEG was used to measure their brain activity when face and toy stimuli was present. In addition to the EEG, structural MRI was also collected while the infant was sleeping.
From Dr. Guy’s experiment, she found out that N290 was mutated in ASIB groups, and enhanced in FXS groups, especially to face recognition. Source analysis results also showed greater activation to faces rather than toys; these activation were mainly in the middle fusiform gyrus and other nearby regions. The main difference between ASIB and FXS groups was that in the ASIB group, patterns of nearby region activation were shown, however, they were mutated. The FXS group on the other hand, had a much greater activation to faces across a wide variety ranges of nearby regions. Therefore, there was a greater N290 in infants with FXS, which was shown by the areas of activation in face processing.
One of Dr. Guy’s main future direction was to find out if there was any biobehavioral markers that lead to ASD in infants, which in this study was infants with ASIB and FXS. Based on the article “Researchers Get Closer to Blood Test for Autism,” Dr. Rabbani has found a link between autism and blood plasma protein through a process called oxidation and glycation. This test basically finds out the damages to those specific plasma proteins. In this process, reactive oxygen species (ROS) and sugar molecules modify these plasma proteins, and more specifically, 92% of the children with higher amounts of oxidation marker dityrosine (DT) and advanced glycation end products (AGEs) were found to be autistic. Therefore, since there is no cure to autism, in addition to looking at biomarkers like ASIB and FXS, looking at other biomarkers such as blood plasma proteins could be a major path towards early prevention.
Works Cited
Fischer, K. (2018). Autism Blood Test Research. [online] Healthline. Available at: https://www.healthline.com/health-news/researchers-get-closer-to-blood-test-for-autism#1 [Accessed 18 Oct. 2018].
Guy, Maggie W., et al. “Neural Correlates of Face Processing in Etiologically-Distinct 12-Month-Old Infants at High-Risk of Autism Spectrum Disorder.” Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience, vol. 29, 2018, pp. 61–71., doi:10.1016/j.dcn.2017.03.002.
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