A study co-led by researchers at UCLA Health has discovered unique brain connectivity patterns in six-week-old infants who are at risk for developing autism spectrum disorder (ASD). The findings suggest that differences in brain responses may appear much earlier than the identification of ASD-related behaviors. Additionally, the study indicates that these brain patterns themselves may contribute to the development of ASD-related behaviors by influencing the typical brain changes that guide social behavior.The findings of their study were published in Nature Communications Biology.
In their study, 53 infants were evaluated, with 24 of them having a higher risk of developing ASD because they had at least one older sibling with an ASD diagnosis. The remaining 29 infants had no family history of ASD or any other developmental disorders. Previous studies have indicated that infants with a sibling with ASD have a 20% chance of developing ASD themselves.
The research focused on the Salience Network, which is a group of brain regions that collaborate to detect and filter important stimuli from the environment.the Salience Network and sensorimotor regions of the brain are more likely to develop attention-related issues as they grow older. These findings suggest that early brain connectivity patterns may play a role in the development of attention and social interaction difficulties associated with ASD. Further research in this area may help identify potential early markers for ASD and inform early intervention strategies.the expense of attention to socially relevant information.
Importantly, these early brain patterns seen at 6 weeks predicted behavior at age one year. Infants with greater connectivity with sensory regions showed great sensory over-responsivity at age one, an impairing condition that is common in autism whereby individuals show extreme responses to typical environmental sounds or sensations. In contrast, infants with more connectivity with social attention regions showed better ability to share at the age of one year.At one year old, children with autism may have difficulty paying attention to others, which is an important factor in developing social and communication skills. The authors of the study believe that these early brain connectivity patterns could help explain the reduced social attention and unusual sensory processing often seen in individuals with ASD. Although the study has limitations due to its small sample size and evaluating connectivity at a single timepoint, the results suggest that atypical patterns of connectivity in the brain’s Salience Network may indicate a developmental vulnerability. Further research with a larger sample size is needed to confirm this possibility.-scale longitudinal studies are heavily sampling brain and behavioral measures during the first postnatal years.”
According to Shulamite Green, Ph.D., an assistant professor at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, an emerging theory in autism research suggests that sensory processing differences may come before the more traditional social and communication symptoms of autism. This data supports the theory by showing that very early brain differences related to attention allocation may predict both sensory and social behaviors in toddlers. In other words, paying more attention to external sensory stimuli in the environment.The efficiency of the brain’s development can be impacted by differences in attention towards social cues during the first year of life and beyond. Dr. Mirella Dapretto, co-author and associate director of the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior, highlighted the significance of these findings in providing a theoretical and mechanistic explanation for the atypical attentional biases for social stimuli in older infants and toddlers who are later diagnosed with ASD.
