Health

The brains of girls and boys with autism are different


Autism is a developmental disorder that can range in severity. Affected children have social and communication impairments, display limited interests, and engage in repetitive behaviors. The original description of autism, published in 1943 by Medical Doctor Leo Kanner, favored male patients. The disorder is diagnosed in four times as many boys as girls, and most autism research has focused on men.

The study’s lead author, Kaustubh Supekar, PhD, an assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences, said: 孏 his research shows that we need to think differently.�

The study is published online at British Journal of Psychiatry.

The study’s lead authors, Vinod Menon, PhD, professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences, and Rachael L. and Walter F. Nichols, MD, Professor.㜁 I know that masking symptoms is a major challenge in diagnosing autism in girls, leading to delays in diagnosis and treatment.

Girls with autism often have fewer overtly repetitive behaviors than boys, which may contribute to delays in diagnosis, say the researchers. said. Lawrence Fung, MD, PhD, assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences, who was not the study’s author, said: “Today, men and women do not exhibit the same expression, both in behavior and nervous, is very attractive”.

Fung treats people with autism at Stanford Children 𠏋 Health, including girls and women with late diagnoses. Many autism treatments work best during the preschool years, when the brain’s language and motor centers are developing, he notes.

If the treatments can be done at the right time, it can make a big, big difference: For example, children with autism who receive early language intervention have a better chance of developing language like others and will continue to play catch-up as they grow up,” said Fung. 𨧻 fa children cannot speak for themselves, they fall behind in many different areas. The consequences are really serious if they are not diagnosed early.

New statistical methods make the difference

The study analyzed brain scans of 773 children with autism, 637 boys and 136 girls. Gathering enough data to include a large number of girls in the study is challenging, says Supekar, noting that the historically small number of girls included in autism research is a barrier. barriers to learning more about them. The team relied on data collected at Stanford and on a public database containing brain scans from research sites around the world.

The predominance of boys in brain scan databases also poses a mathematical challenge: Standard statistical methods used to find differences between groups require the groups to be roughly the same size. equal. These methods, which underlie machine learning techniques, in which algorithms can be trained to find patterns in very large and complex data sets, can be suitable for real-world situations in one group is four times larger than the other.

Hen, I tried to determine the difference [with traditional methods], the algorithm will tell me every brain is male with autism,” said Supekar. Do not study too much and do not distinguish boys and girls with autism.

Supekar discussed this with Tengyu Ma, PhD, assistant professor of computer science and statistics at Stanford and co-author of the study. Ma recently developed a method that can reliably compare complex data sets, such as brain scans, from groups of different sizes. The new technique has provided the breakthrough scientists need. It is fortunate that this new statistical method has been developed at Stanford,” said Supekar.

What is the difference?

Using 678 brain scans of children with autism, researchers have developed an algorithm that can distinguish between boys and girls with 86 percent accuracy. When they verified the algorithm on the remaining 95 brain scans of children with autism, it maintained similar accuracy in distinguishing between boys and girls.

The scientists also tested the algorithm on 976 brain scans from normally developing boys and girls. The algorithm was unable to distinguish between them, confirming that the sex differences the scientists found were unique to autism.

Among children with autism, girls have different patterns of connection to boys in several brain centers, including the motor, language, and visual attention systems. Differences in a group of motor areas � including primary motor cortex, supplementary motor areas, lateral and lateral occipital cortex, and medial and superior temporal gyrus � were greatest between the sexes. Among girls with autism, the difference in motor centers was related to the severity of their motor symptoms, meaning that girls had a brain pattern that closely resembled their own. Boys with autism tend to have the most pronounced motor symptoms.

The researchers also identified language areas that differ between boys and girls with autism, and note that previous studies have identified more language impairment in children. male. You see that there are differences in the brain regions involved in the clinical symptoms of autism, which seems more real,” said Supekar.

Taken together, these findings should be used to guide future efforts to improve the diagnosis and treatment of girls, the researchers say. Menon says your research promotes the use of artificial intelligence-based techniques for precise psychiatry in autism.

㜁 You may need to have different tests for women than for men. The artificial intelligence algorithms we developed can help improve autism diagnoses in girls,” said Supekar. At the treatment level, interventions for girls could be done earlier, he added.

Source: Eurekalert



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