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Autism Affects All the Brain, Not Only the AmygdalaAutistic children have far more deficiencies than inability to interact or communicate with the others |
By Alexandra Lupu, Health News Editor
18th of August 2006, 15:13 GMT
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Even if previous studies found that autism affects only the amygdala region of the brain, more recent research proved that the disease affects the functioning of the entire brain. The amygdala is the area of the brain concerned with the autonomic responses associated with fear, emotional responses, sexual arousal and hormonal secretions. The amygdala region is located
in the temporal lobe of the brain, working through the hypothalamus and adjacent to the hippocampus.
When injured, the amygdala may lead to changes in the aggressive and emotional behavior. Which leads to a close link between the less than normal number of neurons in this area of the brain and autism - as the amygdala is responsible for the emotional and other responses in the brain, crucial for the social learning that autistic persons lack.
Autism is a disorder of brain functioning that appears early in life, generally before the age of three. Autistic individuals have problems with learning capacity, social interaction, communication, imagination and behavior. Autistic traits persist into adulthood, but vary in severity. Some of the adults with autism become rather normal, going to college and living on their own, while others never develop the skills of daily living. The origin or the cause that leads to this neurological disorder is still unknown.
But the new study supported by the National Institutes of Health does not only affect the brain regions concerned with social, communication or reasoning abilities and behaviors. Its action on autism patients is more ample and also affects another wide range of skills and abilities, such as sensory perception, movement and memory.
The research was conducted by experts in the Collaborative Program of Excellence in Autism (CPEA) and is due to be published in the August issue of the Child Neuropsychology Journal. If until now studies were concerned with investigating children's difficulty in interacting and communicating with the others, the new research focused on other aspects of thinking and brain functioning in autism. They found that people with autism do not only have problems with socializing and communicating, but they also present balance, movement, memory and visual perception problems.
"We set out to find commonalities across a broad range of measures, so that we could make inferences about what's going on in the brain," said the study's senior author, Nancy Minshew, M.D., Professor of Psychiatry and Neurology at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine.
Tests showed that autistic children did great when it came to simple tasks, but they could not manage more complex tasks. For instance, autistic children were very good at finding small objects in a cluttered visual field, but they could not tell the difference between the faces of similar looking people. Moreover, when told a story, the autistic kids proved to have a fantastic memory for details in the story, but they failed to understand the whole idea of the story. When testing the autistic kids' grammar, researchers found that they had a good command of grammar, but they failed to understand the figures of speech.
"These findings show that you can't compartmentalize autism under three basic areas. It's much more complex than that. Our paper strongly suggests that autism is not primarily a disorder of social interaction, but a global disorder affecting how the brain processes the information it receives - especially when the information becomes complicated," Dr. Minshew said.
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