FMRI Can Be Used to Detect Autism

In a new scientific investigation, researchers sought to determine the potential uses that a brain imaging technique called functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) could have on detecting autism.

For the research, the research team selected a group of 12-year-old kids, of which 15 were healthy control, and 12 exhibited signs of language impairment. All autistic children were age-matched.

According to the team, fMRI was used to document the language impairment the sick kids were displaying. In other words, they wanted to monitor the areas of the brain that exhibited the most important changes.

Studies such as this are conducted so that healthcare providers could finally become capable of setting better diagnostics for their children. The reason why fMRI is used is because the method can measure neural activity in live brain tissues.

The experiments themselves were carried out as the test subjects were listening to recordings of their parents talking to them, while being hooked up to the fMRI machine. Details of the study have already been published online and will also appear in the upcoming August print issue of the journal Radiology.

“With the extraordinarily high prevalence of autism, you would think there would be an objective diagnosis for the disorder. However, the diagnosis of autism currently remains limited to parent and clinician observation of missed developmental milestones,” explains Joy Hirsch, PhD.

The expert, who is based at the Columbia University Department of Radiology Center for Neurobiology and Behavior, is also the Director Program for Imaging and Cognitive Sciences, and a professor at the university, PsychCentral reports.

Investigating the root causes of autism is increasingly important in today's society, especially when considering that official statistics indicated that 1 in 110 kids suffers from the condition. The numbers were provided by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

The fMRI investigations found significant differences in neural activity patterns pertaining to the superior temporal gyrus (STG). Autistics children exhibited lower activity in this cortical region, which studies demonstrated is involved in sentence comprehension.

“These findings first tell us that the autistic children in our study appeared normal with respect to the primary auditory system. But it appears that the STG in the autistic brains was not as sensitive to the language narratives as was the STG in the brains of the typical children,” Hirsch explains.

“This study suggests that fMRI acquired during listening to a language narrative can be used to distinguish children with autism from those without,” the investigator goes on to say.

“Based on these initial findings, future studies using these or similar fMRI methods may result in an early and objective imaging indicator for autism .The need for an early, objective diagnosis is enormous,” she emphasizes.