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Special Needs Research and News
Gainesville Music Therapy parents receive frequent e-mails with the articles of interest to the special needs community, including research on Autism, Down Syndrome, ADHD, etc.; conferences and trainings being offered in the local area; and information on music therapy practice. If you would like to receive these articles, and/or our monthly newsletter by e-mail, please e-mail us to join the mailing list.
Tuesday, December 20, 2005Special-needs students have more college optionsThe number of two- and four-year college programs for students with developmental disabilities has soared from 35 to more than 90 in just the past year, according to federal education data. At Elmhurst College in Illinois, disabled students enrolled in the Life Skills Academy program get to experience campus culture while they pursue a customized curriculum.Read more ... permalink posted on 12:12 PM 0 comments
Oxygen Deprivation May Contribute to AutismMonday, Dec. 19 (HealthDay News) -- New research with rats suggests that oxygen deprivation during birth could be a contributing cause of autism.There's no easy way to test the oxygen-deprivation theory in humans, and the finding isn't likely to lead to better treatments in the near future. Still, the research gives scientists greater insight into how factors other than genetics may play a role in autism, said Fabrizio Strata, a neuroscience researcher at the University of California, San Francisco and co-author of the study. Symptoms of autism, the most common condition in a group of developmental disorders known as autism spectrum disorders, can range from mild to severe. The disability usually strikes by age 3. It lasts a lifetime, and there is no cure, although some people with autism can learn to function well. According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, autism is characterized by three distinctive behaviors. Autistic children have difficulties with social interaction, display problems with verbal and nonverbal communication, and exhibit repetitive behaviors or narrow, obsessive interests. Scientists are not certain what causes autism, but it is likely that both genetics and environment play a role. For reasons that aren't clear, autism seems to have become more common in recent years. One hotly debated theory suggests that vaccines are responsible, although some studies have failed to find a link. Oxygen deprivation during birth is considered one possible cause because it can lead to brain damage. By boosting the level of nitrogen in the air, Strata and colleagues deprived rat pups of normal levels of oxygen for as long as 10 to 12 minutes during birth. When the rats grew older, they displayed symptoms similar to those found in autistic children. It took longer for the rats to respond to some sounds, for example, and the brain regions that handle sound were disrupted. Why would a baby be oxygen-deprived in the first place? According to Strata, a complicated labor can cut off a newborn's oxygen supply, as can a twisted umbilical cord. Andy Shih, chief science officer with the National Alliance for Autism Research, said the oxygen-deprivation study presents an "interesting hypothesis," although the research hasn't been confirmed in humans. It's possible that future research could lead to changes in obstetric practices to minimize the chance that babies will go without oxygen, Shih said. But "we're far away from that at this point." The study findings appear in the Dec. 19-24 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. permalink posted on 8:10 AM 0 comments
Thursday, December 15, 2005German doctors to treat children with cerebral palsy with acupuncture therapyHighlight:In the Children's Rehabilitation Center of Georgia, German doctors have begun providing acupuncture to young patients suffering from cerebral palsy, as they expect major improvements in those who undergo the sessions. Original source: http://www.messenger.com.ge/issues/0995_november_25_2005/news_0995_4.htm Summary:
permalink posted on 12:07 PM 0 comments
Surprising autism findingMedical Research NewsNew brain imaging research at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill indicates that when people with autism look at a face, activity in the brain area that responds is similar to that of people without autism. The finding is surprising, as it is widely known that autistic individuals tend to avoid looking directly at faces. The research also counters previous published reports that the face-processing area at the back of the brain is under-responsive in people with autism, and it suggests that specific behavioral interventions may help people with autism improve their ability to interact socially. The study was conducted by Dr. Aysenil Belger, associate professor of psychiatry in UNC's School of Medicine and of psychology in UNC's College of Arts and Sciences; and Dr. Gabriel Dichter, postdoctoral research fellow within UNC's Neurodevelopmental Disorders Research Center. The study involved functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI. Unlike standard MRI scans that show anatomical structures in black and white, fMRI offers digitally enhanced color images of brain function, depicting localized changes in blood flow and oxygenation. When particular regions of the brain increase their neural activity in association with various actions or thought processes, they emit enhanced blood oxygen level dependent signals. The signals can be localized in the brain and translated into digital images that portray neural activity level as a ratio of oxygenated to de-oxygenated hemoglobin, the iron-containing pigment in red blood cells. Researchers then can quantify these signals to generate maps of various brain functions. "The brain regions 'specialized' for face processing, the fusiform gyrus, activated almost identically in our autistic study participants and the control group of individuals without autism. This is one very simple and clear-cut finding," Belger said. Previous brain imaging findings of under-responsiveness in the facial area have led some experts to consider this a key cause of the social impairments observed in autism. But Belger and Dichter said they thought the problem might have more to do with a deficit in "executive function" in portions of the brain's frontal lobes than with a selective deficit in the brain's processing of information from faces. These portions of the frontal lobes are where "executive" tasks, such as sifting through complex information, selecting task-appropriate responses or inhibiting inappropriate ones, take place. "In other words, these tasks require high levels of cognitive control," Belger said. "We wanted to find out if these executive functions of particular brain regions that are critical for the appropriate generation of actions show deficits in autistic individuals. In addition, we wanted to see if these deficits were further compounded by the presence of social cues on which executive decisions had to be based," Belger added. The study compared fMRI scans of people with autism and those without the disorder as they performed a one-hour task that required them to attend to certain items in the visual environment while disregarding other items. Specifically, participants wore special goggles through which were displayed pictures of arrows (non-social items) and faces (social items) and were asked to report the direction of the central arrow or central face by pushing a left or right button. Participants were shown horizontal rows of five arrows or five faces. Sometimes all the arrows and faces were oriented in the same direction. At other times, the central arrow or face was in the opposite direction. The test with arrows alone had been used previously in studies elsewhere, but the addition of faces was unique to this new study. "We wanted to know if previous findings of under-responsiveness in the 'face area' of the brain in autism could be simply attentional, or related to an inability to willingly direct attention to the pertinent feature of a face, gaze direction in this instance," Dichter said, adding that most such studies did not account for where the participants fixed their gaze during brain scanning. Because individuals with autism typically choose to look away from faces, the previous studies could not disentangle the effects of a preference to look away from faces from actual brain deficits in the ability to process faces. "We required participants to indicate whether faces were looking left or right, thereby requiring that they look at the picture of the face," Dichter said. In addition, Belger and Dichter pointed to research that correlated the amount of time autistic people looked at features of a face with activation of the amygdala, the "anxiety center" of the brain. They propose that the use of behavioral interventions aimed, perhaps, at de-sensitizing autistic individuals to the anxiety triggered by looking at faces may help to improve the quality of social interactions, at least from the perspective of caregivers and others involved with them. "The idea is that maybe behavioral methods can help a child with autism approach facial stimuli without anxiety. This is strictly conjecture, but it is a tantalizing possibility," Dichter said. Imaging allows researchers to begin looking at underlying mechanisms in brain function, Belger said. "Still, we must be careful in our interpretation of the results. Our findings need to be replicated and the research also broadened to include longitudinal studies," he added. permalink posted on 12:05 PM 0 comments
Tuesday, December 13, 2005We feel your pain... and your happiness tooThe human brain's source of empathy may also play a role in autismBy Carey Goldberg, Boston Globe Do you ever feel a twitch in your arm as you watch a baseball player wallop the ball? When others cry, do your eyes tear up as well? Do you tense as a TV surgeon slices into an incision? Those are your "mirror neurons" at work. Just over a decade ago, Italian neuroscientists studying monkeys were amazed to discover that the brain has a system of neurons, or nerve cells, that specialize in a sort of "walking in another's shoes" function. Some of the same neurons, they found, become active when a monkey actually makes a movement and when it is only watching another monkey, or even a human, make that same movement. It is as if the monkey is imitating -- or mirroring -- the other's movement in its mind. The discovery of mirror neurons was important for basic brain science, but now it is also proving medically relevant: Researchers are reporting in the January issue of the journal Nature Neuroscience that malfunctioning mirror neurons appear to play a central role in the social isolation of autistic children. "We found that, lo and behold, the kids that had the most severe symptoms were the ones that had the least amount of activity" in certain mirror neurons, said lead author Mirella Dapretto of the University of California at Los Angeles. Dapretto's team used an MRI to scan the brains of 10 autistic and 10 non-autistic children to see how their mirror neurons reacted as they saw and imitated pictures of faces expressing anger, happiness or other emotion. The study, the first to look at the mirror neuron system in autistic children, found that the system was generally less active in the autistic children than in the non-autistic ones. The findings add to a body of work in adults suggesting that problems with mirror neurons contribute to the trouble that autistic people have connecting with others. Autistic children often seem unable to read emotions and intentions, and unable to develop a "theory of mind" -- the idea that other people think and feel as they do. In the non-autistic children, Dapretto writes in the paper, which has already been released on-line, the mirror-neuron activity "further indicates that this mirroring mechanism may underlie the remarkable ability to read others' emotional states from a mere glance at their faces." Indeed, scientists believe that the mirror neurons may help form the biological basis of empathy, and the penchant for imitation -- the baby responding to a smile with a smile, the toddler clapping as a teacher claps -- that is at the very foundation of so much of learning. The mirror neuron system seems to be involved not in the rational sort of empathy involved in purposely imagining yourself in another's place, Dapretto said, but in the deep, automatic empathy of "really feeling what another person is feeling." Overall, said Marco Iacoboni, a leading mirror-neuron researcher who is at UCLA with Dapretto, "We've made really huge progress in the last 10 years in understanding what these neurons do." Mirror neurons are simply motor neurons -- the brain cells that control movements. But they show signs of activity not only when a person moves, but when a person only observes someone else making that movement. In monkeys, the patterns can be picked up by using hair-thin needles to record the activity of single neurons in the brain; in humans, researchers can track them using less invasive methods like brain scans. Earlier this year, Iacoboni published work suggesting that the mirror neurons respond not merely to another person's action but to the intention behind that action. He found that the mirror neurons did not fire much when study subjects looked at a simple image of a hand picking up a coffee cup. But, when the cup was part of a social situation -- a table set for a party or a messy table that needed clearing -- their mirror neurons became much more active. So when we see another person act, maybe the mirror neurons "are not just encoding the actions, but going deeper," he said. They seem to respond to emotions or intentions, as well. Fascinating, but can the growing understanding of mirror neurons somehow help autistic children? "That's the $64 million question, and it's unclear," said Kimberly Montgomery, a mirror-neuron researcher at Princeton University. ''If the deficits in autism are linked to low activity in the mirror neuron system, then the hope would be that if you diagnose someone with autism early," you might be able to fix their mirror neurons, she said. Another possibility, she said, is that other parts of the brain may be able to compensate for mirror-neuron malfunctions, and therapies could focus on strengthening those other areas. Also, previous research has found that mirror neurons are more active when a professional dancer watches familiar ballet movements, for instance, than unfamiliar martial-arts movements. So in autistic children, current therapies that help them become more familiar with emotions might work by bolstering mirror neurons, Montgomery said. It is unclear whether a drug could target specifically the mirror neurons because we know practically nothing about the pharmacology of the mirror cells. Rather, Dapretto said, her findings seem to offer support for therapy with autistic children that emphasizes the use of imitation. Among brain scientists, mirror neurons are a hot topic these days not only because of their link to autism. At last month's Society for Neuroscience annual meeting, researchers reported they had used both scanners and electroencephelograms, which measure electrical activity in the brain, to explore mirror neurons in a variety of ways. One report, by the prominent neuroscientist V. S. Ramachandran of the University of California at San Diego, even suggested that mirror neurons could be involved when people understand metaphors. These are early days for research into mirror neurons, but Ramachandran predicted in a 2000 essay (available online at www.edge.org/3rd_culture/ramachandran/ramachandran_p1.html) that they "will do for psychology what DNA did for biology: they will provide a unifying framework and help explain a host of mental abilities that have hitherto remained mysterious and inaccessible to experiments." They could even help explain how language emerged in early humans, he argued in the essay. Iacoboni warns, however, that all the news may not be rosy. It could be, for example, that mirror neurons contribute to violence. "Being exposed to violence in the media may facilitate this violent behavior in your brain," he said. "I think mirror neurons are good for a lot of things but might also be bad." permalink posted on 1:38 PM 0 comments
Monday, December 12, 2005UCLA imaging study of children with autism finds broken mirror neuron systemFindings pinpoint mechanism behind social deficitsNew imaging research at UCLA detailed Dec. 4 as an advance online publication of the journal Nature Neuroscience shows children with autism have virtually no activity in a key part of the brain's mirror neuron system while imitating and observing emotions. Mirror neurons fire when a person performs a goal-directed action and while he or she observes the same action performed by others. Neuroscientists believe this observation-execution matching system provides a neural mechanism by which others' actions, intentions and emotions can be understood automatically. Symptoms of autism include difficulties with social interaction -- including verbal and nonverbal communication -- imitation and empathy. The new findings dramatically bolster a growing body of evidence pointing to a breakdown of the brain's mirror neuron system as the mechanism behind these autism symptoms. "Our findings suggest that a dysfunctional mirror neuron system may underlie the social deficits observed in autism," said Mirella Dapretto, lead author and assistant professor in residence of psychiatry and biobehavioral sciences at the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior at UCLA and the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. "Together with other recent data, our results provide strong support for a mirror neuron theory of autism. This is exciting because we finally have an account that can explain all core symptoms of this disorder." Conducted at the Semel Institute's Ahmanson-Lovelace Brain Mapping Center, the research used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to measure brain activity in 10 high-functioning children with autism while they imitated and observed 80 photos depicting different emotions such as anger, fear, happiness or sadness. In addition, the brain activity of 10 typically developing children was studied while performing the same tasks. Separately, symptom severity of each child with autism was tested using two independent measures (the Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule -- Generic, and the Autism Diagnostic Interview). The study shows that unlike typically developing children, children with autism have virtually no activity in the pars opercularis of the inferior frontal gyrus, identified by previous research as a key part of the mirror neuron system. Importantly, the level of mirror neuron activity seen in children with autism was inversely related to symptom severity in the social domain. Children with autism also showed reduced activity in the emotion centers of the brain, consistent with the hypothesis that this mirroring mechanism may play a crucial role for understanding how others feel and for empathizing with them. All of the children rehearsed the tasks prior to the fMRI scans to assure researchers they could perform the tasks. Both groups performed equally well. Normal brain activity in areas of the brain involving sight and facial movements indicated that the children with autism remained on task during the fMRI scans. permalink posted on 7:16 AM 0 comments
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