Researchers at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, have found significant differences in brain development in children starting from age 6 months with children considered at high-risk and who later developed autism, compared to high-risk infants who did not develop autism. The group has published their findings on the University’s Medical School website and their paper has been accepted for publication at a later date in the American Journal of Psychiatry.
Because of speculation in recent months by researchers in the field, that autistic markers might be apparent in younger children than had been previously studied, the team at UNC asked parent’s of high-autism risk children to allow their infants to undergo MRI scans and were able to convince 92 of them to enter the research study. High-risk infants are those who have an older sibling with autism. All of the volunteered children were given MRI scans at 6 months, then again at 12 and 24 months regardless of whether they had developed autism.
In studying the results, the team found what they describe as significant differences in brain structure in high-risk infants as young as six months who later became autistic, compared to other infants in the same study. In all, 24 of the 92 infants in the study developed an autism spectrum disorder by age two, which accounts for approximately thirty percent of the study group. This number was not unexpected of course, since the entire group was considered at high risk when the study began.
The researchers say that the differences seen were in the white matter, or pathways that connect different regions of the brain. Differences were both observational by the human eye, and by use of fractional anisotropy, which measures liquid movement through the brain. The team measured 15 separate tracts in each of the children tested and found differences in 12 of them on average, suggesting their results were not merely chance. The researchers also found that children who later developed autism generally had higher levels of differences in brain tracts at six months, but then leveled off, indicating that just a slight change in structure may be enough to either cause or be caused by any number of autism spectrum disorders.
The researchers conclude by saying that their results show very clearly that brain differences in children as young as six months show that autism is very likely caused either by in-vitro environmental conditions or are hereditary in nature, adding new evidence to refute any notion that autism is linked in any way to vaccinations children receive to prevent diseases.