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"The demand is far greater than the number of clinicians , the number of programs and the number of beds we have," said Righi, a research assistant professor of psychiatry and human behavior at the Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University who treats acute care patients with autism spectrum disorders at the E.P. Bradley Hospital. "One of the biggest issues is the availability of acute care services such as day hospital programs and inpatient units to support families when their children's behaviors have escalated to the point of making a situation unsafe at home, at school or sometimes both." Identifying and addressing the factors that make hospitalization more likely, she said, could reduce such instances. Notably, only two of the risk factors identified in the study of patients with an autism spectrum disorder (ASD) -- their severity of autism symptoms and the degree of their "adaptive" daily life functioning -- were specific consequences...

These questions were put to the test by a group of University of Miami psychologists who studied hundreds of fMRI brain scans, from two separate datasets, to see how the variability of brain signals changes or remains the same during a human lifespan. The UM team analyzed hundreds of brain scans of participants, ranging in age from 6 to 86, who were all in a "resting state," which means they were not engaged in any particular task while in the fMRI scanner. The publicly available data, which is freely available to neuroimaging researchers, was acquired from the Nathan-Kline institute. "Resting state is a misnomer because intrinsically your brain is always doing something. There is always something happening in the brain," said postdoctoral fellow Jason Nomi. "The scans we are looking at represent the baseline variability of ongoing activity in the brain at any given time. No one has really characterized this baseline across the lifespan." Lucina U...

Most sensory information from the outside world -- including sight, touch and sound -- is collected in a region of the brain called the thalamus. The thalamus then relays signals to the cerebral cortex, the brain's outermost layer responsible for higher processes like decision-making. "The reticular thalamus acts like a gate that filters information from the thalamus and dispatches signals to the cortex," explained Jeanne Paz, PhD, assistant investigator at Gladstone and senior author of the new study. "You can think of it as a switchboard operator from the 1950s, who would transfer incoming calls to the correct parties." The reticular thalamus is involved in several functions, including attention, perception, and consciousness. Disruptions in this region can lead to seizures and psychiatric disorders such as schizophrenia and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). However, little is known about how neurons in this brain region function as gateke...

Twenty years ago, a team of scientists at the University of Cambridge developed a test of 'cognitive empathy' called the 'Reading the Mind in the Eyes' Test (or the Eyes Test, for short). This revealed that people can rapidly interpret what another person is thinking or feeling from looking at their eyes alone. It also showed that some of us are better at this than others, and that women on average score better on this test than men. Now, the same team, working with the genetics company 23andMe along with scientists from France, Australia and the Netherlands, report results from a new study of performance on this test in 89,000 people across the world. The majority of these were 23andMe customers who consented to participate in research. The results confirmed that women on average do indeed score better on this test. More importantly, the team confirmed that our genes influence performance on the Eyes Test, and went further to identify genetic variants on chromoso...

Autism affects roughly 1 out of every 68 children in the United States. Siblings of children diagnosed with autism are at higher risk of developing the disorder. Although early diagnosis and intervention can help improve outcomes for children with autism, there currently is no method to diagnose the disease before children show symptoms . "Previous findings suggest that brain-related changes occur in autism before behavioral symptoms emerge," said Diana Bianchi, M.D., NICHD Director. "If future studies confirm these results, detecting brain differences may enable physicians to diagnose and treat autism earlier than they do today." In the current study, a research team led by NIH-funded investigators at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis focused on the brain's functional connectivity -- how regions of the brain work together during different tasks and during rest. Using fcMRI , the rese...

Published in  Science Translational Medicine , this paper describes a second type of brain biomarker that researchers and potentially clinicians could use as part of a diagnostic toolkit to help identify children as early as possible, before autism symptoms even appear. "The  Nature  paper focused on measuring anatomy at two time points (six and 12 months), but this new paper focused on how brain regions are synchronized with each other at one time point (six months) to predict at an even younger age which babies would develop autism as toddlers." said senior author Joseph Piven, MD, the Thomas E. Castelloe Distinguished Professor of Psychiatry at the UNC School of Medicine, and director of the Carolina Institute for Developmental Disabilities. "The more we understand about the brain before symptoms appear, the better prepared we will be to help children and their families." Co-senior author John R. Pruett Jr., MD, PhD, associate professor of psychiatry at Was...

The findings are important because a clearer appreciation of how musicians silently work together -- across tempo changes, phrasing and musical dynamics -- will improve our understanding of nonverbal communication. That could lead to better techniques to reach those with conditions such as autism or dementia, say researchers. Using sophisticated technology, which included infrared markers, motion capture sensors and mathematical modelling, scientists examined the movements of musicians from two professional string quartets. They found they could predict from the body sway of one musician, what another would do next. While some assumed the role as leaders, and others followers, researchers found the leaders were far more influential in the ensemble . They also found the degree of body sway communication among the musicians was connected to their perceptions of how well they performed together. "Although we are often not consciously aware of it, non-verbal communications b...

Scientists report in the June 12 issue of the  Journal of Neuroscience  that mice genetically engineered to mimic a type of autism in humans, fragile X syndrome, are unable to adapt to, or tune out, repeated stimulation to their whiskers -- unlike ordinary mice. The findings have implications for a common symptom -- sensory hypersensitivity -- in humans with autism. "If we can understand more about this mechanism, or help push the brain in the direction of adaptation, we could really help children with autism," said Dr. Carlos Portera-Cailliau, professor of neurology and neurobiology at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA and the paper's senior author. "Currently, their brains do not mature in a way that allows this adaptation mechanism to work properly." Hypersensitivity to touch, sounds, taste and other sensory input is a central feature of autism, a disorder characterized by social interaction difficulties, repetitive behaviors and language impa...

The study is the most robust to date to explore the risk of ASD associated with fevers across the entire span of pregnancy, and of the capacity of two different types of commonly used anti-fever medications -- acetaminophen and ibuprofen -- to address that risk. Risks were minimally mitigated among the children of women taking acetaminophen for fever in the second trimester. Although there were no cases of ASD among children of mothers who took ibuprofen, a nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drug, researchers could not ascertain whether risk was mitigated due to the extremely small number of women using this particular drug for fever. Results of the study appear in the journal  Molecular Psychiatry . The researchers followed 95,754 children born between 1999 and 2009, including 583 cases of ASD identified in Norway through the Autism Birth Cohort (ABC) Study. Mothers of 15,701 children (16 percent) reported fever in one or more four-week intervals throughout pregnancy, similar to...

Now researchers at Jefferson have discovered a molecule that may play a role in helping maintain the balance of excitatory and inhibitory neurons. The results were published in the journal  eLife , a project of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the Wellcome Trust and the Max Planck Institute. Timothy Mosca, Ph.D., Assistant Professor in the Department of Neuroscience at the Vickie and Jack Farber Institute for Neuroscience of Thomas Jefferson University, discovered that a molecule called LRP4, was important in creating excitatory synapses -- the ones that keep a message passing from one neuron to the next. When the researchers knocked out the LRP4 gene in fruit flies, they saw a 40 percent loss of excitatory synaptic connections in the brain, but no such loss of inhibitory synapses, suggesting that the molecule was specific to one kind of synapse. The researchers used a new technology called expansion microscopy to get a better view of the fruit fly neurons. "In most case...