SAN FRANCISCO, Jan. 24 (UPI) -- Findings from behavioral and brain studies are expanding and evolving researchers' understanding of autism, its causes, consequences and potential cures.
One group reported observing peculiar behaviors reminiscent of autism in studies of 50-month-old tykes who as babies had endured untold misery in Romanian orphanages -- institutions notorious for their cruel conditions.
"This was not parental neglect, but severe deprivation where the children were left in their crib for hours with no contact, in a very extreme situation," said lead author Dr. Helen Egger, a child psychiatrist and assistant professor of psychiatry at Duke University in Durham, N.C.
She presented the findings at a meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development in Atlanta.
"We are not looking at autism per se but at the effects of severe neglect and deprivation," Egger said in an interview. "Are there mechanisms that are similar in these children that will help us understand what happens in autism?"
Or are they poles apart?
"(In autism) flapping and spinning may result because children are so bombarded with stimuli, it's a way to block some of it out," Egger speculated. "But kids in a neglected environment may be rocking to provide themselves with desperately needed stimulation. The symptoms may look similar but have different mechanisms."
To get at the answer, the investigators are taking a variety of biological measures of the children to detect abnormalities in their brains' electrical activity and conducting blood tests to gauge their bodies' responses to stress.
In an important advance that speaks to how neuron, or nerve-cell, connections are formed, two independent teams working with rats have identified a master protein that appears to regulate the lifelong promoting and pruning of the cellular links in response to outside stimulation.
Understanding the protein, and the molecular pathway it guides, could provide insight into learning and memory, and how they are altered in autism and other psychiatric disorders and neurodegenerative diseases in which the neuron connections called synapses either fail to form or run rampant, the study authors said in the journal Science.
In another study, of 76 children ages 8 to 16, brain scientists found those with autism differ from those without in two specific areas of memory that may underlie such hallmarks of the disorder as trouble with social interaction and information processing.
The finding, reported in the journal Neuropsychology, suggests children with autism can't see the forest for the trees at least in part because they bear the unique burden of processing all those trees at once.
They lack the automatic "cross talk" between the brain's reasoning and memory systems that distinguishes the most important information and dictates how to organize it, the researchers said.
The children also showed poor working memory for spatial information, meaning it was difficult for them to remember the location of an object once it disappeared from their sight, the investigators said.
The results are suggestive, they said, because this type of memory gets its bearing from a specific region of the frontal cortex -- an area of the brain known to malfunction in autism.
Despite the impairments, the children did just fine with other types of recall, such as associative learning, suggesting some departure from the norm in how they organize memory and how their brain connects with the frontal cortex, the portion responsible for reasoning, planning, abstract thought and other complex cognitive functions, the authors reported.
If these differences are present from birth, their confounding effect will stack up alongside the complexities -- in social interactions, communication, problem solving -- that mark a child's journey to adulthood, scientists conjectured.
Thus, the most mundane circumstance can befuddle a youngster looking at the world through autism's prism, they said.
The study authors offered the example of a group of adolescents joking about the love story portrayed in a poster advertising a romantic comedy when one of them interrupts with an enthusiastic endorsement of a football film.
It is difficult to tell who's more startled: the teens at the seeming non sequitur or the boy at the reaction to his perfectly natural response to what he saw -- a tiny shadow in a sports jersey barely visible behind the towering figures of the embracing stars.
The research provides a clear indication there's more to autism than the social-language-reasoning behavioral triad of difficulties that typifies the current view of the disorder -- a view the study authors said they find far too narrow.
Among studies that shift the focus to the biological side of the autism equation, a groundbreaking investigation has shown a person with the disorder uses a more limited area of the brain to read and comprehend a sentence than does a non-autistic peer with the same IQ.
Using novel imaging instruments to measure brain activity, the team found the autistic child differs from the typically developing one in two key language areas.
The results, which support previous findings of autism-associated irregularities in "white matter" -- the "cables" that hook up the various brain parts to each other -- inspired the researchers to propose the "underconnectivity theory."
It holds that autism is a system-wide brain disorder that limits coordination and integration among the various cerebral regions. This disunity impairs the ability to complete intellectual tasks, impeding complex thinking and social interaction, the authors surmised.
The scientists described theirs as the first published description of atypical goings-on in the brain of an autistic individual performing a cognitive, as opposed to a social, task.
(Note: In this multi-part installment, based on dozens of reports, conferences and interviews, Ped Med is keeping an eye on autism, taking a backward glance at its history and surrounding controversies, facing facts revealed by research and looking forward to treatment enhancements and expansions. Wasowicz is the author of the new book, "Suffer the Child: How the Healthcare System Is Failing Our Future," published by Capital Books.)
Next: Autism as a cognitive disorder
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