It may be hard-wired into children with autism. Read more:
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Kids with autism have less flexible brains, researchers say in a new
study that may help explain why switching from rest to a task can be
particularly difficult for those on the spectrum.
Brain scans of children with autism indicate that there’s little
difference in how key networks connect no matter if they’re at rest or
engaged in an activity, according to findings published this week in the journal Cerebral Cortex.
In contrast, typically-developing children display a more significant shift in brain connections when they take on new tasks.
For the study, researchers used functional magnetic resonance
imaging, or fMRI, to observe brain activity in 34 kids with autism and
34 without. Each child was monitored at rest and while performing two
tasks — solving a simple math problem and looking at pictures of
different faces.
While the kids with autism performed just as well on the tasks as
their typically-developing peers, their brains functioned very
differently. Those on the spectrum maintained fairly similar connections
between areas of the brain that control important functions like
decision-making and socialization no matter whether they were at rest or
engaged in one of the activities.
What’s more, the less flexible these children’s brains appeared in
the scans, the more pronounced their autism symptoms were, the study
found. Specifically, the level of flexibility correlated with the degree
to which a child displayed restrictive and repetitive behaviors like
obsessing on a favorite topic or sticking to a routine.
“The fact that we can tie this neurophysiological brain-state
inflexibility to behavioral inflexibility is an important finding
because it gives us clues about what kinds of processes go awry in
autism,” said Vinod Menon, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral
sciences at the Stanford University School of Medicine and the senior
author of the study.
Moreover, the researchers said their findings could have implications for autism interventions.
“The findings may help researchers evaluate the effects of different
autism therapies,” said Kaustubh Supekar, a research associate at
Stanford who worked on the study. “Therapies that increase the brain’s
flexibility at switching from rest to goal-directed behaviors may be a
good target, for instance.”
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