BOSTON, Dec. 26 (UPI) -- Researchers are performing brain tests, including MRIs, on infants to determine if the child faces future developmental problems.
Rutgers University scientists say they can predict with 90 percent accuracy whether a 6-month-old will have speech problems by age 3, simply by measuring how quickly the child's brain processes patterns of rapidly played "beeps," the Boston Globe reported Monday.
In another study, published by Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, premature children who were slower at processing information and weaker at remembering it at 7 months old ended up scoring worse on mental development tests when they were 2 and 3.
And at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, scientists plan within weeks to resume scanning the brains of sleeping babies, using state-of-the-art MRI technology capable of capturing even the delicate, shifting pathways that connect neurons, the newspaper said.
In theory, the newspaper said, such early diagnoses would allow for early intervention when the brain is most malleable. On the downside, however, early brain-based diagnoses could end up giving children labels that later prove inaccurate, researchers said.
