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Due to the wide range of symptoms and severity, autism spectrum disorders have not yet been linked to a single cause. However, a study conducted by researchers at the University of Virginia reveals a promising new strategy for getting answers, which could lead to breakthroughs in the study of other neurological diseases and disorders.
Current autism research focuses on observing and understanding the disorder through the study of its behavioral consequences, using techniques such as functional magnetic resonance imaging to map the brain’s responses to input and activity, but also the causes of those responses. Little research has been done to determine what.
Also read: Neurological conditions leading cause of poor health, disability globally: Lancet
However, researchers at UVA’s College and Graduate School of Arts and Sciences have been able to better understand the anatomical differences between the brain structures of autistic and non-autistic individuals through the use of diffusion MRI, a technique that allows molecular imaging in biological tissues. Measures diffusion. To see how water moves throughout the brain and interacts with cellular membranes. This approach has helped the UVA team develop mathematical models of the brain’s microscopic structures, helping to identify structural differences in the brains of people with and without autism.
“It’s not well understood what those differences are,” said Benjamin Newman, a postdoctoral researcher in UVA’s Department of Psychology, a recent graduate of the UVA School of Medicine’s Neuroscience graduate program, and lead author of a paper published this month in PLOS. “Can happen.” One. “This new approach looks at neuronal differences that contribute to the etiology of autism spectrum disorders.”
Based on the work of Alan Hodgkin and Andrew Huxley, who won the 1963 Nobel Prize in Medicine for describing the electrochemical conductivity characteristics of neurons, Newman and his co-authors applied those concepts to understand how autism How this conductivity differs in people with and without autism. , using the latest neuroimaging data and computational methods. The result is the first approach of its kind to calculate the conductivity of nerve axons and their ability to carry information through the brain. The study also provides evidence that these microstructural differences are directly related to participants’ scores on the Social Communication Questionnaire, a common clinical tool for diagnosing autism.
“What we’re seeing is that autistic people have differences in the diameter of microstructural components in the brain that may cause them to conduct electricity slower,” Newman said. “This is the structure that disrupts the way the brain works.”
One of Newman’s co-authors, John Darrell Van Horn, professor of psychology and data science at UVA, said that too often we try to understand autism through a collection of behavioral patterns that may be atypical or seem different. Can.
“But understanding those behaviors can be a bit subjective, depending on who is doing the observations,” Van Horn said. “We need more fidelity in terms of the physiological metrics that we have so that we can better understand where those behaviors are coming from. This is the first time that this type of metric has been applied in a clinical population , and it sheds some interesting light on the origins of ASD.”
Van Horn said a lot of work has been done with functional magnetic resonance imaging, looking at blood oxygen-related signal changes in autistic individuals, but he said, this research “goes a little deeper.”
“It’s not asking whether there’s a particular cognitive functional activation difference; it’s asking how the brain actually processes the information around it through these dynamic networks,” Van Horn said. “And I think we’ve been successful in showing that there is something that is uniquely different about autistic-spectrum-disorder-diagnosed individuals relative to typically developing control subjects.”
Newman and Van Horn, along with co-authors Jason Druzgal and Kevin Pelphrey of the UVA School of Medicine, are affiliated with the National Institutes of Health’s Autism Center of Excellence (ACE), an initiative that is largely multidisciplinary and multidisciplinary. -Institutional supports. Studies on ASD aimed at determining the causes and possible treatments of the disorder.
According to Pelphrey, a neuroscientist and expert on brain development and the study’s principal investigator, the overarching aim of the ACE project is to pave the way for developing a precision medical approach to autism.
“This study provides the foundation of a biological target to measure treatment response and allows us to identify pathways for future treatments to be developed,” he said.
Van Horn said the study could also have implications for the detection, diagnosis and treatment of other neurological disorders, such as Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s.
“It’s a new tool for measuring properties of neurons that we’re particularly excited about. We’re still exploring what we might be able to find out with it,” Van Horn said.
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