By the numbers
1%: U.S. children with autism spectrum disorders
5: Average age for diagnosis
40%: Children with autism who do not talk
$35 billion: Annual spending on caring for people with autism
$3.2 million: Amount spent caring for each person with autism over their lifetime
SOURCES: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; Harvard University School of Public Health
San Diego researchers who scanned the brains of sleeping toddlers have opened a window into the mystery of what goes wrong in the mind of a child with autism, an important step toward diagnosing the condition earlier and determining what treatments work best.
Scientists at the UCSD Autism Center of Excellence who performed the MRI scans as part of a three-year study had to overcome the challenge of getting their young, and often rambunctious, subjects to remain perfectly still so that clear images could be produced.
They did it by using a trick known to every parent.
Children were kept active for an entire day then ate a large meal before arriving at the La Jolla center for their scans. Most of the exhausted toddlers quickly fell into a deep sleep that lasted for the duration of the test.
While it’s not unusual to use MRI imaging to observe the brain functions of children, the practice rarely has been used on youngsters with autism because of the difficulty of having them remain motionless for extended lengths of time, said neuroscientist Eric Courchesne, director of the UCSD center.
Experts said the research marked an important milestone in the effort to decipher a debilitating condition whose cause and cure remain unknown.
“It’s a very exciting study,” said David Mandell, associate director of the Center for Autism Research at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.
Mandell led a panel of reviewers who selected the UCSD study to be among the papers presented at the International Meeting for Autism Research, which was recently held in Philadelphia. The local study was among four highlighted during a news conference at the gathering.
The UCSD researchers said they will submit the study to a medical journal for publication.
“It presents a new paradigm of how you can study the brain” of children with autism, Mandell said. “Since we can start them so young, we can watch those brains develop.”
About 1 in 110 children in the United States have autism spectrum disorders, a range of developmental disabilities that include autism and Asperger’s syndrome, according to a December report by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That amount represented a significant increase over the agency’s previous estimate that 1 in 150 children had the disorders.
The UCSD study enrolled 43 children between the ages of 13 months and 4 years. They followed the children for two years, long enough to diagnose 23 with autism. The others developed normally.
Once the children were sleeping, they listened to a recording of a woman reading a bedtime story through earphones.
The researchers found abnormally low activity in the left temporal cortex of the brains of the children with autism. That area, just above the left ear, has long been suspected of playing a part in the developmental disorder because of its critical role in learning language.