Ultrasound reveals autism risk at birth

Low-birth-weight babies with a particular brain abnormality are at greater risk for autism, according to a new study that could provide doctors a signpost for early detection of the still poorly understood disorder.

Led by Michigan State University, the study found that low-birth-weight newborns were seven times more likely to be diagnosed with autism later in life if an ultrasound taken just after birth showed they had enlarged ventricles, cavities in the brain that store spinal fluid. The results appear in the Journal of Pediatrics.

“For many years there’s been a lot of controversy about whether vaccinations or environmental factors influence the development of autism, and there’s always the question of at what age a child begins to develop the disorder,” said lead author Tammy Movsas, clinical assistant professor of pediatrics at MSU and medical director of the Midland County Department of Public Health.

“What this study shows us is that an ultrasound scan within the first few days of life may already be able to detect brain abnormalities that indicate a higher risk of developing autism.”

Movsas and colleagues reached that conclusion by analyzing data from a cohort of 1,105 low-birth-weight infants born in the mid-1980s. The babies had cranial ultrasounds just after birth so the researchers could look for relationships between brain abnormalities in infancy and health disorders that showed up later. Participants also were screened for autism when they were 16 years old, and a subset of them had a more rigorous test at 21, which turned up 14 positive diagnoses.

Ventricular enlargement is found more often in premature babies and may indicate loss of a type of brain tissue called white matter.

“This study suggests further research is needed to better understand what it is about loss of white matter that interferes with the neurological processes that determine autism,” said co-author Nigel Paneth, an MSU epidemiologist who helped organize the cohort. “This is an important clue to the underlying brain issues in autism.”

Prior studies have shown an increased rate of autism in low-birth-weight and premature babies, and earlier research by Movsas and Paneth found a modest increase in symptoms among autistic children born early or late.

London neuroscience centre to map ‘connectome’ of foetal brain

A state-of-the-art imaging facility at St Thomas’ Hospital in London has been awarded a 15m euro grant to map the development of nerve connections in the brain before and just after birth.

The Centre for the Developing Brain — which is partly funded by King’s College London (KCL) — has built a unique neonatal Magnetic Resonance Imaging Clinical Research Facility based in the intensive care unit of the Evelina Children’s Hospital at St Thomas’. It is one of two centres in the world — the other being at Imperial College — to have such a clinical research facility and associated scanner within a neonatal intensive care unit.

Over the next few years a team headed up by David Edwards, a consultant neonatologist and KCL Professor of Paediatrics and Neonatal Medicine, will build up a diagram of connections in the brain of babies as they develop in the womb and then after they are born. The aim is to understand how the human brain assembles itself from a functional and structural perspective. The resulting map is called a connectome and is the brain equivalent of the human genome. It will be made available to the research community to help improve understanding of neurological disorders.

Fear, anger or pain. Why do babies cry?

Spanish researchers have studied adults’ accuracy in the recognition of the emotion causing babies to cry. Eye movement and the dynamic of the cry play a key role in recognition.

It is not easy to know why a newborn cries, especially amongst first-time parents. Although the main reasons are hunger, pain, anger and fear, adults cannot easily recognise which emotion is the cause of the tears.

"Crying is a baby’s principal means of communicating its negative emotions and in the majority of cases the only way they have to express them," as explained to SINC by Mariano Chóliz, researcher at the University of Valencia.

Chóliz participates in a study along with experts from the University of Murcia and the National University of Distance Education (UNED) which describes the differences in the weeping pattern in a sample of 20 babies between 3 and 18 months caused by the three characteristic emotions: fear, anger and pain.

In addition, the team observed the accuracy of adults in recognising the emotion that causes the babies to cry, analysing the affective reaction of observers before the sobbing.

According to the results published recently in the ‘Spanish Journal of Psychology’, the main differences manifest in eye activity and the dynamics of the cry.

"When babies cry because of anger or fear, they keep their eyes open but keep them closed when crying in pain," states the researcher.

As for the dynamic of the cry, both the gestures and the intensity of the cry gradually increase if the baby is angry. On the contrary, the cry is as intense as can be in the case of pain and fear.

The adults do not properly identify which emotion is causing the cry, especially in the case of anger and fear.

Nonetheless, “although the observers cannot recognise the cause properly, when babies cry because they are in pain, this causes a more intense affective reaction than when they cry because of angry or fear,” outlines Chóliz.

For the experts, the fact that pain is the most easily recognisable emotion can have an adaptive explanation, since crying is a warning of a potentially serious threat to health or survival and thus requires the carer to respond urgently.

Anger, fear and pain

When a baby cries, facial muscle activity is characterised by lots of tension in the forehead, eyebrows or lips, opening of the mouth and raised cheeks. The researchers observed different patterns between the three negative emotions.

As Chóliz notices, when angry the majority of babies keep their eyes half-closed, either looking in apparently no direction or in a fixed and prominent manner. Their mouth is either open or half-open and the intensity of their cry increases progressively.

In the case of fear, the eyes remain open almost all the time. Furthermore, at times the infants have a penetrating look and move their head backwards. Their cry seems to be explosive after a gradual increase in tension.

Lastly, pain manifests as constantly closed eyes and when the eyes do open it is only for a few moments and a distant look is held. In addition, there is a high level of tension in the eye area and the forehead remains frowned. The cry begins at maximum intensity, starting suddenly and immediately after the stimulus.

Shedding New Light on Infant Brain Development

A new study by Columbia Engineering researchers finds that the infant brain does not control its blood flow in the same way as the adult brain. The findings, which the scientists say could change the way researchers study brain development in infants and children, are published in the February 18 Early Online edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

“The control of blood flow in the brain is very important,” says Elizabeth Hillman, associate professor of biomedical engineering and of radiology, who led the research study in her Laboratory for Functional Optical Imaging at Columbia. “Not only are regionally specific increases in blood flow necessary for normal brain function, but these blood-flow increases form the basis of signals measured in fMRI, a critical imaging tool used widely in adults and children to assess brain function. Many prior fMRI studies have overlooked the possibility that the infant brain controls blood flow differently.”

“Our results are fascinating,” says Mariel Kozberg, a neurobiology MD-PhD candidate who works under Hillman and is the lead author of the PNAS paper. “We found that the immature brain does not generate localized blood-flow increases in response to stimuli. By tracking changes in blood-flow control with increasing age, we observed the brain gradually developing its ability to increase local blood flow and, by adulthood, generate a large blood-flow response.”

The study results suggest that fMRI experiments in infants and children should be carefully designed to ensure that maturation of blood-flow control can be delineated from changes in neuronal development. “On the other hand,” says Hillman, “our findings also suggest that vascular development may be an important new factor to consider in normal and abnormal brain development, so our findings could represent new markers of normal and abnormal brain development that could potentially be related to a range of neurological or even psychological conditions.”

Brain plasticity

Babies’ brains are highly plastic, meaning they’re constantly adapting as they learn and respond to the world and people around them.

Daphne Maurer, director of the Visual Development Laboratory at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, has found clues as to when plasticity might be locked off in babies and how in some adults it actually may persist unbeknown to them.

Bilingual babies know their grammar by 7 months

Babies as young as seven months can distinguish between, and begin to learn, two languages with vastly different grammatical structures, according to new research from the University of British Columbia and Université Paris Descartes.

Published today in the journal Nature Communications and presented at the 2013 Annual Meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in Boston, the study shows that infants in bilingual environments use pitch and duration cues to discriminate between languages – such as English and Japanese – with opposite word orders.

In English, a function word comes before a content word (the dog, his hat, with friends, for example) and the duration of the content word is longer, while in Japanese or Hindi, the order is reversed, and the pitch of the content word higher.

"By as early as seven months, babies are sensitive to these differences and use these as cues to tell the languages apart," says UBC psychologist Janet Werker, co-author of the study.

Previous research by Werker and Judit Gervain, a linguist at the Université Paris Descartes and co-author of the new study, showed that babies use frequency of words in speech to discern their significance.

"For example, in English the words ‘the’ and ‘with’ come up a lot more frequently than other words – they’re essentially learning by counting," says Gervain. "But babies growing up bilingual need more than that, so they develop new strategies that monolingual babies don’t necessarily need to use."

"If you speak two languages at home, don’t be afraid, it’s not a zero-sum game," says Werker. "Your baby is very equipped to keep these languages separate and they do so in remarkable ways."

Newborn babies walk the walk

Before you can run, you have to walk, and before you can walk well, you have to walk like a brand-new baby. A new study uncovers the logistics of newborns’ herky-jerky, Frankensteinian stepping action and how this early reflex morphs into refined adult locomotion.

In the study, electrodes on infants’ chubby legs picked up signals from neurons that tell muscles to fire, revealing that three-day old babies tense up many of their leg muscles all at once. Toddlers, preschoolers and adults, by contrast, showed a progressively more sophisticated, selective pattern of neuron activity.

From birth to adulthood, motor neurons in the spine get an overhaul as neurons in different  locations along the spine become specialized for various aspects of walking, such as foot position, balance and direction, Yuri Ivanenko of the Santa Lucia Foundation in Rome and colleagues conclude in the Feb. 13 Journal of Neuroscience.

Yale researchers spot attention deficits in babies who later develop autism

Researchers at Yale School of Medicine are able to detect deficits in social attention in infants as young as six months of age who later develop Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD). Published in the current issue of Biological Psychiatry, the results showed that these infants paid less attention to people and their activities than typically developing babies.

Katarzyna Chawarska, associate professor at the Yale Child Study Center, and her colleagues investigated whether six-month-old infants later diagnosed with ASD showed prodromal symptoms — early signs of ASD such as an impaired ability to attend to social overtures and activities of others. Before this study, it had not been clear whether these prodromal symptoms were present in the first year of life.

“This study highlights the possibility of identifying certain features linked to visual attention that can be used for pinpointing infants at greatest risk for ASD in the first year of life,” said Chawarska. “This could make earlier interventions and treatments possible.”

Infants process faces long before they recognize other objects

New research from psychology Research Professor Anthony Norcia and postdoctoral fellow Faraz Farzin, both of the Stanford Vision and NeuroDevelopment Lab, suggests a physical basis for infants’ ogling. At as early as four months, babies’ brains already process faces at nearly adult levels, even while other images are still being analyzed in lower levels of the visual system.

The results fit, Farzin pointed out, with the prominent role human faces play in a baby’s world.

"If anything’s going to develop earlier it’s going to be face recognition," she said.

The paper appeared in the online Journal of Vision.

The researchers noninvasively measured electrical activity generated in the infants’ brains with a net of sensors placed over the scalp – a sort of electroencephalographic skullcap.

The sensors were monitoring what are called steady state visual potentials – spikes in brain activity elicited by visual stimulation. By flashing photographs at infants and adults and measuring their brain activity at the same steady rhythm – a technique Norcia has pioneered for over three decades – the researchers were able to “ask” the participants’ brains what they perceived.

When the experiment is conducted on adults, faces and objects (like a telephone or an apple) light up similar areas of the temporal lobe – a region of the brain devoted to higher-level visual processing.

Infants’ neural responses to faces were similar to those of adults, showing activity over a part of the temporal lobe researchers think is devoted to face processing.