The latest autism research news stories with ASF Chief Science Officer Alycia Halladay
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….or at a podcast with at least an attempt at an explanation of what synaptic density is and how it is affected in brains of people with autism. This week we review three convergent lines of evidence – whole brain, brain cell then genes within those brain cells – that show that the autistic brain has a decrease in cell-to-cell communication in multiple brain regions, leading to social communication impairments.
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The media accurately described a recent study from Dan Geschwind’s lab at UCLA as “groundbreaking”. That’s because the findings help people with autism better understand how and why their symptoms are different to other mental conditions, specifically bipolar depression and schizophrenia. It turns out the gene expression patterns in the brains of people with autism are similar to those with bipolar depression and schizophrenia, but not alcoholism or major depression. It also offers hope for a more accurate biological signature of autism that can be distinguished from bipolar depression and schizophrenia. Below is a graph that represents these different profiles, and if you want to read a version of the article that is available online (but before it was peer reviewed in the journal Science) you can find it here: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/biorxiv/early/2016/02/18/040022.full.pdf 