Autism in Children Linked to Increased Blood Flow in Brain

The “social” area of the brain might be linked to autism in children, according to the newest medical tests. These neural regions are not fully developed and inadequately networked between them, as recent results presented in the American psychiatric publications have shown. The research, performed by in Los Angeles’ UCLA, offers a better understanding into how the mind of kids and teenagers with ASD could be structured in a different way than youngsters without this mental affection.

Our brain handles the majority of our actions and important changes in its areas and how they perform and are connected to each other will modify our behavior and cause neural complications associated with psychological problems.

To see whether kids with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) can have a proper development or insufficiency of neural connections in their “social brain”, scientists analyzed 15 little children and teenagers diagnosed with ASD. Then, the compared their brain scans to those of 20 normally developed children. The US experts used imaging methods to monitor blood circulation to evaluate their brains’ energy use, and assessed various implicit sensory systems to see the durability of these connections.

This study represents the first analysis when an MRI device, called arterial marking perfusion, was required to study the deepest effects of ASD in children. This method, which applies magnetically marked blood cells as a tracker to observe blood circulation inside the brain’s tissues, has been used before to discover new symptoms and alternative cures for schizophrenic affections.

The scientists found that kids autism spectrum disorder had an extended and increased blood flow inside their brain, a process known as hyper-perfusion. This intense activity was taking place mostly in frontal areas of the brain, the ones that are essential in learning and handling social communication. In normal brains, the flow in blood vessels is usually reduced, indicating that neurodevelopment linked to socio-emotional activities in kids suffering of ASD is significantly delayed.

They also discovered that, in contrast with normally developed children, kids with ASD have decreased long-range connections between remote parts of their brain, showing that information does not circulate from one region to another as it should. This can also explain the children’s problems in social situations. The structure of our nervous system follows a complex cabling design that increases performance with little energy required. However, this is not what experts discovered in their ASD members. In the near future, knowing the scientific processes behind these neural activities could lead to developments in analysis and treatments.

Previous studies also discovered a very precise blood-based evaluation that might lead to a medical analysis for ASD risk in young male children between ages one and two. These tests may be conducted on larger groups of children with different brain configurations.

The level of precision, as experts said, surpasses other genetic and behavioral tests for babies and youngsters with forms of ASD presented in medical literature. The known causes of autism spectrum disorder are complicated and different, making it very difficult to effectively identify the illness long before a kid’s 4^th year of life. The average age of clinical diagnosis in North America is around 4.5 years.

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