Autism-World

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) – The typical brain activity that occurs when most
people are resting or daydreaming is impaired or absent in individuals with
autism, new research suggests.

The activity in this so-called “resting network” normally aids in the
processing of emotional and social cues, “the very things that are abnormal
in autism,” lead investigator Daniel P. Kennedy noted in comments to Reuters
Health.

The resting network is known to be highly active when an individual is at
rest.

When someone is asked to perform a mentally demanding task that is not of a
social or emotional nature — like a math problem — the resting network
shuts down or is deactivated, “most likely reflecting a reduction in these
unconstrained resting thoughts,” explained Kennedy, a graduate student in
the neuroscience PhD program at the University of California at San Diego in
La Jolla.

Kennedy, along with Elizabeth Redcay, a UCSD graduate student in psychology,
and Eric Courchesne, also at UCSD, report their findings in the Proceedings
of the National Academy of Sciences, Early Edition.

Through brain imaging, Kennedy and his colleagues saw that the resting
network of the autistic brain does not deactivate, likely because this high
resting activity is not there during rest.

“We think that this finding makes sense in terms of understanding the social
and emotional aspects of the disorder,” Kennedy said. “We found that a
network of brain regions important for social and emotional processing is
abnormal in a disorder of social and emotional processing,” he said.

The scientists also observed that the more abnormal the resting brain
activity in the medial prefrontal cortex appeared, the more socially
impaired the autistic subject was. Therefore, “it does seem that there is a
clear relationship between this resting network and social impairment in
autism,” Kennedy said.

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 31st, 2007 at 8:13 pm and is filed under Parent Resources.