By Victoria Gill Science reporter, BBC Nature Gorillas bare their teeth in a playful "grin" to reassure one another during play, scientists have discovered. This "flash of teeth" seems to let their playmate know that they do not intend to harm them. The researchers, from the University of Portsmouth, study the facial expressions of primates to uncover the evolutionary origins of human smiling and laughter. They published their findings in the American Journal of Primatology. Lead researcher Dr Bridget Waller explained that non-human primates have two expressions "that shed light on our smiling". Their "playface", she explained, appears to be a foundation of human laughter. Dr Waller told BBC Nature: "[During play, gorillas] open their mouths and cover their teeth as if to say, 'I could bite you but I'm not going to'." Another expression the primates use, where they reveal both rows of "sparkly white teeth" is believed to show one of the origins of human smiling. Smiling signal This is not a playful expression, Dr Waller said. "It's a greeting; a subordinate display." BBC © 2012

Keyword: Emotions; Evolution
Link ID: 16328 - Posted: 02.02.2012

By Sandra G. Boodman, “Men in Black” was flickering on the screen, and Laura Cossolotto and her husband were enjoying a rare night at the movies in their home town of Centerville, Iowa, when her brother-in-law rushed into the darkened theater. The couple’s third child, 6-month-old Michaela, had just suffered a serious seizure and was at a nearby hospital. As Cossolotto raced to be with the baby, she immediately remembered that Michaela had been running a fever after receiving a vaccine against diphtheria, pertussis and tetanus (DPT) three days earlier. “I thought the shot must have something to do with it,” Cossolotto recalled. “I had three kids, and nothing like this had ever happened, so what else could it have been?” At the hospital, doctors reassured her that Michaela had suffered a febrile seizure, a frightening and usually harmless event they said was unlikely to recur. As a precaution, the baby was admitted for observation. Hours later, after doctors had trouble controlling a second, more severe seizure, the infant was whisked by helicopter to a larger hospital in Des Moines, 100 miles north. That night in July 1997 marked the beginning of a 101 / 2-year ordeal, as more than a dozen specialists in four states tried without success to find an underlying cause for Michaela’s frequent, in­trac­table seizures — and a treatment that would control them before they caused irreparable brain damage or death. © 1996-2012 The Washington Post

Keyword: Epilepsy; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 16327 - Posted: 01.31.2012

Brian Switek The largest mammals to walk Earth evolved from shrew-like creatures that proliferated after the dinosaurs died out, 65 million years ago. But the change from pipsqueak to behemoth took a while: 24 million generations. Researchers led by Alistair Evans, an evolutionary biologist at Monash University in Clayton, Australia, investigated how maximum body mass increased among 28 orders of mammals on multiple continents during the past 70 million years. By comparing the sizes of the largest members of mammal groups at different points in time, and using modern mammals to estimate the length of a generation for each group, Evans and colleagues tracked the speed at which mammals expanded. Their work is published online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences1 today. The top speed of mammal inflation was slower than had been thought. Previous estimates of the time it takes for a mouse-sized mammal to grow to the size of an elephant — a 100,000-fold size increase — had been based on observations of much smaller, 'microevolutionary' changes in mice, and ranged from 200,0002 to 2 million generations. “This tells us how much slower so-called macroevolution is compared to microevolution,” says Evans, explaining that small size changes can occur quickly, but larger-scale alterations require more time. To put this into perspective, “if we wiped out everything above the size of a rabbit, it would take at least 5 million generations to get to elephant-sized animals”, a 1,000-fold increase. That translates to about 20 million years. Bucking the trend But not all groups followed the same rule. Whales, the largest mammals ever, grew much more quickly than land-dwelling mammals, needing only about 3 million generations for a 1,000-fold size increase. Evans says that the difference was probably the result of different evolutionary constraints of life in the sea, such as the need to retain body heat, which is easier with a larger body mass. © 2012 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Evolution
Link ID: 16326 - Posted: 01.31.2012

By ABIGAIL ZUGER, M.D. Science generally succeeds in bringing some order to human existence — except when it does just the reverse, imposing a structure that never quite fits properly no matter how much it is tweaked. Then it just accentuates the underlying chaos. The much-disputed, oft-revised manual of psychiatric diagnosis might serve as one illustration of this phenomenon; given that it runs to almost 1,000 pages, Hanne Blank gets a pat on the back for dispatching the equally murky entity of heterosexuality in fewer than 200, plus back matter. One can almost hear a chorus of experts in the many sciences of sex and gender muttering that her amusing, readable synthesis is a featherweight effort, simplistic and derivative. But for those not in the field but still in the game, as it were — readers never previously moved to reason from first principles exactly what it means to be a heterosexual or act like one — Ms. Blank darts from one intriguing, thought-provoking point to another. She is a self-described “independent scholar” in Baltimore with several volumes of erotica and a well-received history of the virgin to her credit. Is Ms. Blank herself a heterosexual? That question prompts the first of her looping mind games. She has had romantic relationships with women in the past — so, no, right? Now, though, she is in a stable, long-term romantic partnership with a man (so, yes, right?). But her partner has a complicated genome, with some ordinary male XY cells and some that have an XXY pattern, giving him a softer, more stereotypically feminine aspect than usual, despite standard-issue male genitalia. And suddenly that word, “heterosexual,” becomes less than the helpful, scientifically precise term one might wish for. © 2012 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 16325 - Posted: 01.31.2012

By NATALIE ANGIER Meet the African crested rat, or Lophiomys imhausi, a creature so large, flamboyantly furred and thickly helmeted it hardly seems a member of the international rat consortium. Yet it is indeed a rat, a deadly dirty rat, its superspecialized pelt permeated with potent toxins harvested from trees. As a recent report in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B makes clear, the crested rat offers one of the most extreme cases of a survival strategy rare among mammals: deterring predators with chemical weapons. Venoms and repellents are hardly rare in nature: Many insects, frogs, snakes, jellyfish and other phyletic characters use them with abandon. But mammals generally rely, for defense or offense, on teeth, claws, muscles, keen senses or quick wits. Every so often, however, a mammalian lineage discovers the wonders of chemistry, of nature’s burbling beakers and tubes. And somewhere in the distance a mad cackle sounds. Skunks and zorilles mimic the sulfurous, anoxic stink of a swamp. The male duck-billed platypus infuses its heel spurs with a cobralike poison. The hedgehog declares: Don’t quite get the point of my spines? Allow me to sharpen their sting with a daub of venom I just chewed off the back of a Bufo toad. © 2012 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Evolution; Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste)
Link ID: 16324 - Posted: 01.31.2012

By James Gallagher Health and science reporter, BBC News Skin cells have been converted directly into cells which develop into the main components of the brain, by researchers studying mice in California. The experiment, reported in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, skipped the middle "stem cell" stage in the process. The researchers said they were "thrilled" at the potential medical uses. Far more tests are needed before the technique could be used on human skin. Stem cells, which can become any other specialist type of cell from brain to bone, are thought to have huge promise in a range of treatments. Many trials are taking place, such as in stroke patients or specific forms of blindness. One of the big questions for the field is where to get the cells from. There are ethical concerns around embryonic stem cells and patients would need to take immunosuppressant drugs as any stem cell tissue would not match their own. An alternative method has been to take skin cells and reprogram them into "induced" stem cells. These could be made from a patient's own cells and then turned into the cell type required, however, the process results in cancer-causing genes being activated. The research group, at the Stanford University School of Medicine in California, is looking at another option - converting a person's own skin cells into specialist cells, without creating "induced" stem cells. It has already transformed skin cells directly into neurons. BBC © 2012

Keyword: Stem Cells
Link ID: 16323 - Posted: 01.31.2012

by Jessica Hamzelou YOU'RE running late for work and you can't find your keys. What's really annoying is that in your frantic search, you pick up and move them without realising. This may be because the brain systems involved in the task are working at different speeds, with the system responsible for perception unable to keep pace. So says Grayden Solman and his colleagues at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada. To investigate how we search, Solman's team created a simple computer-based task that involved searching through a pile of coloured shapes on a computer screen. Volunteers were instructed to find a specific shape in a stack as quickly as possible, while the computer monitored their actions. "Between 10 and 20 per cent of the time, they would miss the object," says Solman, even though they picked it up. "We thought that was remarkably often." To find out why, the team developed a number of further experiments. To check whether volunteers were just forgetting their target, they gave a new group a list of items to memorise before the search task, which they had to recall afterwards. The idea was to fill each volunteer's "memory load", so that they were unable to hold any other information in their short-term memory. Although this was expected to have a negative effect on their performance at the search task, the extra load made no difference to the percentage of mistakes volunteers made. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Attention; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 16322 - Posted: 01.31.2012

By Andrea Anderson Mood disorders such as depression are known to increase drug abuse risk. Yet mounting evidence suggests that substance abuse also makes people more vulnerable to depression and the negative effects of stress, according to Eric J. Nestler, chair of neuroscience at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine. He and his team reported new details about the link between depression and drug abuse in Neuron in August. The team found that mice given cocaine daily for a week—a simulation of chronic drug abuse in humans—were more likely than their drug-free counter­parts to display behaviors reminiscent of depression after being subjected to socially stressful situations involving an aggressive and intimidating mouse. The drug-treated mice became lethar­gic and reluctant to interact with other mice following a shorter-than-usual bout of this “social defeat” stress, which is commonly used to study depression in mice. Most striking, the researchers found that the cocaine use led to the same molecular changes in the nucleus accumbens, a reward region, as are found in mice prone to stress and depression. The mice had lower levels of a molecule that polices the activity of certain genes and keeps at least one signaling circuit in check. When the researchers artificially dialed down or up the levels of this regulatory molecule in the nucleus accumbens, they were able to produce or protect against depression in mice. This effect suggests that shifts in that brain region can cause—and are not just a side effect of—depression. © 2012 Scientific American,

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Stress
Link ID: 16321 - Posted: 01.31.2012

By Ferris Jabr At a meeting of the Icelandic Medical Association last week, Yale University child psychologist Fred Volkmar gave a presentation on how the American Psychiatric Association (APA) is changing the definition of autism. In his talk, Volkmar came to a startling conclusion: more than half of the people who meet the existing criteria for autism would not meet the APA’s new definition of autism and, therefore, may not receive state educational and medical services. The APA defines autism in a reference guide for clinicians called the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Mental Disorders (DSM). The newest version of the manual, the DSM-5, is slated for publication in May 2013. In Iceland, Volkmar presented data from an unpublished preliminary analysis of 372 high-functioning autistic children and adults with IQs above 70. He plans to publish a broader analysis later this year. On a key PowerPoint slide that Volkmar shared with Scientific American, he notes that there are 2,688 ways to get a diagnosis of autistic disorder in DSM-IV, but only six ways to get a diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder in DSM-5. Although intriguing at first glance, it turns out that both these numbers are slightly wrong—and that they are pretty much useless when comparing the DSM-IV and DSM-5. You cannot reduce autism to a math problem. Scientific American wanted to explore this gaping discrepancy further, so we asked astronomer and Hubble Fellow Joshua Peek of Columbia University to code a computer program that would calculate the total possible ways to get a diagnosis of autistic disorder in DSM-IV and the total possible ways to get a diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder in DSM-5. You can do the math by hand, too, if you like: It all comes down to factorials. The DSM-IV criteria are a set of 12 items in three groups from which you must choose 6, with at least two items from group one and at least one item each from groups two and three. © 2012 Scientific American

Keyword: Autism
Link ID: 16320 - Posted: 01.31.2012

By Ferris Jabr People have been arguing about autism for a long time—about what causes it, how to treat it and whether it qualifies as a mental disorder. The controversial idea that childhood vaccines trigger autism also persists, despite the fact that study after study has failed to find any evidence of such a link. Now, psychiatrists and members of the autistic community are embroiled in a more legitimate kerfuffle that centers on the definition of autism and how clinicians diagnose the disorder. The debate is not pointless semantics. In many cases, the type and number of symptoms clinicians look for when diagnosing autism determines how easy or difficult it is for autistic people to access medical, social and educational services. The controversy remains front and center because the American Psychiatric Association (APA) has almost finished redefining autism, along with all other mental disorders, in an overhaul of a hefty tome dubbed the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM)—the essential reference guide that clinicians use when evaluating their patients. The newest edition of the manual, the DSM-5, is slated for publication in May 2013. Psychiatrists and parents have voiced concerns that the new definition of autism in the DSM-5 will exclude many people from both a diagnosis and state services that depend on a diagnosis. The devilish confusion is in the details. When the APA publishes the DSM-5, people who have already met the criteria for autism in the current DSM-IV will not suddenly lose their current diagnosis as some parents have feared, nor will they lose state services. But several studies recently published in child psychiatry journals suggest that it will be more difficult for new generations of high-functioning autistic people to receive a diagnosis because the DSM-5 criteria are too strict. Together, the studies conclude that the major changes to the definition of autism in the DSM-5 are well grounded in research and that the new criteria are more accurate than the current DSM-IV criteria. © 2012 Scientific American

Keyword: Autism
Link ID: 16319 - Posted: 01.31.2012

By Bruce Bower SAN DIEGO — Willpower comes with a wicked kickback. Exerting self-control saps a person’s mental energy and makes the next desire that inevitably comes along feel more compelling and harder to resist, a study of people’s daily struggles with temptation found. But people best able to resist eating sweets, going out with friends before finishing work or other temptations find ways to steer clear of such enticements altogether, so that they rarely have to resort to self-control, psychologist Wilhelm Hofmann of the University of Chicago reported January 28 at the annual meeting of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology. “Willpower fluctuates throughout the day, rather than being a constant personality trait,” said psychologist and study coauthor Roy Baumeister of Florida State University in Tallahassee, who also summarized at the meeting his recent lab experiments on willpower’s mental effects. “Prior resistance makes new desires seem stronger than usual.” Hofmann and his colleagues contacted 205 adults in a German city at various times of day for a week. Using handheld devices provided by the researchers, volunteers furnished 10,558 reports about desires they encountered or thought about. Most self-reported desires didn’t create problems for participants. When desires conflicted with other goals and called for resistance, volunteers’ willpower failed 17 percent of the time, on average. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2012

Keyword: Attention; Obesity
Link ID: 16318 - Posted: 01.31.2012

By Tina Saey Some people can forgo sleep and still stay sharp. But a new experiment with fruit flies suggests even those gifted people may be making an evolutionary trade-off that ensures sleep is here to stay. A variation in a single gene enables a strain of fruit flies to miss 12 hours of sleep without building up a sleep debt. The flies, nicknamed “rovers” for their active behavior, can also learn and remember things after a sleepless night, scientists report online January 30 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. But, scientists say, the flies that cope well with sleep deprivation appear more vulnerable to vagaries in food supply. The findings may eventually help scientists answer one of the most “fundamental questions in the sleep field, that is ‘what is the core function of sleep?’ ” says David Raizen, a neuroscientist at the University of Pennsylvania who was not involved in the study. In the study, Marla Sokolowski, a behavioral geneticist at the University of Toronto Mississauga, and her colleagues describe how fruit flies with naturally differing versions of the foraging gene behave differently. Flies with the rover version of the gene make more of a protein called protein kinase G or PKG. Rovers also move around more in search of food than flies with the “sitter” version of the gene, which produces lower levels of PKG. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2012

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 16317 - Posted: 01.31.2012

KANSAS CITY, MO – Memories in our brains are maintained by connections between neurons called “synapses”. But how do these synapses stay strong and keep memories alive for decades? Neuroscientists at the Stowers Institute for Medical Research have discovered a major clue from a study in fruit flies: Hardy, self-copying clusters or oligomers of a synapse protein are an essential ingredient for the formation of long-term memory. The finding supports a surprising new theory about memory, and may have a profound impact on explaining other oligomer-linked functions and diseases in the brain, including Alzheimer’s disease and prion diseases. “Self-sustaining populations of oligomers located at synapses may be the key to the long-term synaptic changes that underlie memory; in fact, our finding hints that oligomers play a wider role in the brain than has been thought,” says Kausik Si, Ph.D., an associate investigator at the Stowers Institute, and senior author of the new study, which is published in the January 27, 2012 online issue of the journal Cell. Si’s investigations in this area began nearly a decade ago during his doctoral research in the Columbia University laboratory of Nobel-winning neuroscientist Eric Kandel. He found that in the sea slug Aplysia californica, which has long been favored by neuroscientists for memory experiments because of its large, easily-studied neurons, a synapse-maintenance protein known as CPEB (Cytoplasmic Polyadenylation Element Binding protein) has an unexpected property. SciTechDaily Copyright © 1998 - 2012.

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Alzheimers
Link ID: 16316 - Posted: 01.30.2012

By Joseph Castro, LiveScience Staff Writer Most people are familiar with the telltale squeak of a mouse scurrying out of their pantry, but scientists have long known that these aren’t the only noises house mice make. During courtship, the rodents also communicate in the ultrasonic frequency range, which sits beyond human hearing. Now, new research shows that these mating vocalizations are more than just your typical squeaks — they’re songs, not unlike those you’d expect to hear from courting birds. “It seems as though house mice might provide a new model organism for the study of song in animals," lead researcher Dustin Penn, an evolutionary biologist at the Veterinary University of Vienna in Austria, said in a statement. "Who would have thought that?" Over the last few years, Penn and his colleagues conducted a series of studies on the courtship vocalizations of house mice. In their initial research, published in the journal Animal Behavior in 2010, they caught wild male and female house mice and looked at the vocal nature of their courtship routines. They found that most of the male mice would start their ultrasonic calls the moment they caught the urine scent of a sexually mature female. When the researchers played these calls back to the females, they learned that the females could somehow tell the difference between the calls of their siblings and the calls of unrelated males — the females showed little interest in the squeaks of their brothers. © 2012 msnbc.com

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Animal Communication
Link ID: 16315 - Posted: 01.30.2012

By FRANK BRUNI BORN this way. That has long been one of the rallying cries of a movement, and sometimes the gist of its argument. Across decades of widespread ostracism, followed by years of patchwork acceptance and, most recently, moments of heady triumph, gay people invoked that phrase to explain why homophobia was unwarranted and discrimination senseless. Lady Gaga even spun an anthem from it. But is it the right mantra to cling to? The best tack to take? Not for the actress Cynthia Nixon, 45, whose comments in The New York Times Magazine last Sunday raised those very questions. For 15 years, until 2003, she was in a relationship with a man. They had two children together. She then formed a new family with a woman, to whom she’s engaged. And she told The Times’s Alex Witchel that homosexuality for her “is a choice.” “For many people it’s not,” she conceded, but added that they “don’t get to define my gayness for me.” They do get to fume, though. Last week some did. They complained that she represented a minority of those in same-sex relationships and that she had furthermore handed a cudgel to our opponents, who might now cite her professed malleability as they make their case that incentives to change, not equal rights, are what we need. © 2012 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 16314 - Posted: 01.30.2012

By L. ALAN SROUFE THREE million children in this country take drugs for problems in focusing. Toward the end of last year, many of their parents were deeply alarmed because there was a shortage of drugs like Ritalin and Adderall that they considered absolutely essential to their children’s functioning. But are these drugs really helping children? Should we really keep expanding the number of prescriptions filled? In 30 years there has been a twentyfold increase in the consumption of drugs for attention-deficit disorder. As a psychologist who has been studying the development of troubled children for more than 40 years, I believe we should be asking why we rely so heavily on these drugs. Attention-deficit drugs increase concentration in the short term, which is why they work so well for college students cramming for exams. But when given to children over long periods of time, they neither improve school achievement nor reduce behavior problems. The drugs can also have serious side effects, including stunting growth. Sadly, few physicians and parents seem to be aware of what we have been learning about the lack of effectiveness of these drugs. What gets publicized are short-term results and studies on brain differences among children. Indeed, there are a number of incontrovertible facts that seem at first glance to support medication. It is because of this partial foundation in reality that the problem with the current approach to treating children has been so difficult to see. © 2012 The New York Times Company

Keyword: ADHD; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 16313 - Posted: 01.30.2012

By Morgen Peck When we drive somewhere new, we navigate by referring to a two-dimensional map that accounts for distances only on a horizontal plane. According to research published online in August in Nature Neuroscience, the mammalian brain seems to do the same, collapsing the world into a flat plane even as the animal skitters up trees and slips deep into burrows. “Our subjective sense that our map is three-dimensional is illusory,” says Kathryn Jeffery, a behavioral neuroscientist at University College London who led the research. Jeffery studies a collection of neurons in and around the rat hippo­campus that build an internal representation of space. As the animal travels, these neurons, called grid cells and place cells, respond uniquely to distance, turning on and off in a way that measures how far the animal has moved in a particular direction. Past research has focused on how these cartographic cells encode two-dimensional space. Jeffery and her col­leagues decided to look at how they respond to changes in altitude. To do this, they enticed rats to climb up a spiral staircase while the scientists collected electrical recordings from single cells. The firing pattern encoded very little in­formation about height. The finding adds evidence for the hypothesis that the brain keeps track of our location on a flat plane, which is defined by the way the body is oriented. If a squirrel, say, is running along the ground, then scampers straight up a tree, its internal two-dimensional map simply shifts from the horizontal plane to the vertical. © 2012 Scientific American,

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 16312 - Posted: 01.30.2012

By KIRK JOHNSON DENVER — Proponents of marijuana have argued for years that the drug is safer than alcohol, both to individuals and society. But a ballot proposal to legalize possession of marijuana in small amounts in Colorado, likely to be on the November ballot, is putting the two intoxicants back into the same sentence, urging voters to “regulate marijuana like alcohol,” as the ballot proposition’s title puts it. Given alcohol’s long and checkered history — the tens of thousands of deaths each year, the social ravages of alcoholism — backers of the pro-marijuana measure concede there is a risk of looking as if they have cozied up too much, or are comparable, to old demon rum. “Why add another vice, right?” said Mason Tvert, a co-director of the Campaign to Regulate Marijuana Like Alcohol, which has led the ballot drive. “But we’re not adding a vice; we’re providing an alternative.” The goal of legalization, Mr. Tvert added, is not to make access to marijuana easier, but rather, “to make our communities safer by regulating this substance, taking it out of the underground market, controlling it and better keeping it away from young people.” The debate here and in Washington State — where members of a pro-legalization group have also submitted what they say are more than enough signatures to secure a spot on the ballot — is premised on the idea that marijuana has become, if not quite mainstream, then at least no longer alien to the average voter. Medical marijuana is already legal in both states. © 2012 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 16311 - Posted: 01.28.2012

By ANAHAD O'CONNOR Your daily dose of caffeine may tinker with more than just your energy levels. A new study of women ages 18 to 44 found that drinking coffee and other caffeinated beverages can alter levels of estrogen. But the impact varies by race. In white women, for example, coffee appears to lower estrogen, while in Asian women it has the reverse effect, raising levels of the hormone. The study did not look at older women, but women of child-bearing age who enjoy a daily cuppa have little reason to fret, the researchers said. The effects of caffeine on estrogen are so minimal that in healthy women, it has no impact on ovulation or overall health, at least in the short term. “This is important physiologically because it helps us understand how caffeine is metabolized by different genetic groups,” said Dr. Enrique Schisterman, an author of the study and senior investigator at the National Institutes of Health. “But for women of reproductive age, drinking coffee will not alter their hormonal function in a clinically significant way.” The study, which was published in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, analyzed data on more than 250 women who were examined one to three times a week over two menstrual cycles. They provided blood samples along with details about behaviors like exercise, eating and smoking. On average, they consumed about 90 milligrams of caffeine a day, equivalent to roughly one cup of coffee. © 2012 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Hormones & Behavior
Link ID: 16310 - Posted: 01.28.2012

By James Gallagher Health and science reporter, BBC News It may be possible to detect autism at a much earlier age than previously thought, according to an international team of researchers. A study published in Current Biology identified differences in infants' brainwaves from as early as six months. Behavioural symptoms of autism typically develop between a child's first and second birthdays. Autism charities said identifying the disorder at an earlier stage could help with treatment. It is thought that one in every 100 children has an autism spectrum disorder in the UK. It affects more boys than girls. While there is no "cure", education and behavioural programmes can help. One of the researchers, Prof Mark Johnson from Birkbeck College, University of London, told the BBC: "The prevailing view is that if we are able to intervene before the onset of full symptoms, such as a training programme, at least in some cases we can maybe alleviate full symptoms." His team looked for the earliest signs of autism in 104 children aged between six and 10 months. Half were known to be at risk of the disorder because they had on older sibling who had been diagnosed with autism. The rest were low risk. Older children with autism can show a lack of eye contact, so the babies were shown pictures of people's faces that switched between looking at or away from the baby. BBC © 2012

Keyword: Autism
Link ID: 16309 - Posted: 01.28.2012