Identification of developmental and behavioral markers associated with genetic abnormalities in autism spectrum disorder.
Clinical
Shorter sleep duration is associated with social impairment and comorbidities in ASD.
Severity of ASD symptoms and their correlation with the presence of copy number variations and exposure to first trimester ultrasound.
Non-ASD outcomes at 36 months in siblings at familial risk for autism spectrum disorder (ASD): A baby siblings research consortium (BSRC) study.
Early brain development in infants at high risk for autism spectrum disorder.
Maternal immunoreactivity to herpes simplex virus 2 and risk of autism spectrum disorder in male offspring.
Brain imaging and visual processing study using arbaclofen to assess GABAB receptor activation in autism
Grainne McAlonan plans to use brain imaging methods and out-of-scanner measures to assess responses to arbaclofen, a GABAB receptor agonist, in adults with and without autism spectrum disorder.
Improved automatic analysis of LENA home recordings
Studying interactions between older children and adolescents with their adult caregivers is an important indicator of communication skills and are especially important for assessing children with ASD. Mark Clements aims to develop a fully automated audio recording tool for use in assessing communication skills in children with ASD in naturalistic (e.g., home) environments.
Sleep EEG abnormalities in toddlers with regressive or classical autism
Dinstein will identify early neural abnormalities in two- to four-year-old toddlers with autism using whole-night EEG recordings in a hospital sleep lab. Furthermore, he will examine whether toddlers with regressive and classical autism exhibit distinct abnormalities that may indicate differences in their underlying pathology when comparing their brain activity and sleep architecture with that of typically developing toddlers.
A biomarker of reduced GABAergic action for assessing neural alterations in autism
Autism is a neurodevelopmental disorder in which individuals display a range of challenges in social cognition, language and sensory perception. Sensory perception issues include alterations in visual processing, including reductions in perceptual suppression evident in neuroimaging findings. Such changes in perceptual suppression have recently been shown to relate to reduced action of the inhibitory neurotransmitter GABA in individuals with autism[ref]Robertson C.E. et al. Curr. Biol. 26, 80–85 (2015) PubMed[/ref]. This finding, and others in the literature, support the idea that alterations in GABAergic signaling, which cause an imbalance in excitatory/inhibitory neurotransmission, reflect a central characteristic of the neurobiology of autism. This suggests that the GABAergic pathway represents a viable target for drug therapy in autism. Successful development of such drug therapies will require the identification and validation of suitable biomarkers to track neural alterations in GABAergic signaling.
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