Brock research hunts for autism clues
What if you could see autism? Not the symptoms, which can manifest as behavioural difficulties in young children, but actually see the disorder at work in an infant’s brain before the first symptoms arise.
What could that mean for children and their parents?
That is precisely what Brock University neuroscientist Sid Segalowitz is trying to find out.
For years Segalowitz has used electroencephalography, or EEG, to map electrical activity in the human brain. He has developed a method of mapping what happens in the brain during a wide range of human behaviour including anxiety, aggression in teens and risk taking behaviour.
He is now trying to use his methods to determine if autism can be detected in infants.
“If we could detect autism earlier and diagnose earlier then you can start to deal with it sooner,” said Segalowitz.
“You can’t cure it, but you can use therapeutic interventions earlier, which has a huge benefit.”
Researchers at McGill University, Harvard University, the University of Washington Autism Centre and Birkbeck, University of London have asked Segalowitz to examine the EEG scans of hundreds of toddlers and infants with siblings diagnosed as being on the autism spectrum.
The goal is to determine if the scans can show specific areas of the brain not responding to stimuli they way should and if so, is that a sign the child has an autism disorder?
Segalowitz said the process is not as easy as looking at a scan and pointing to a problem area. The brain is just too complicated for that.
“Your brain controls everything. Every process in your body is controlled by your brain, much of it being unconscious, like blinking and breathing,” he said.
When Segalowitz scans a person’s brain using an EEG, his equipment registers electrical activity for everything the brain is doing. Every eye blink, twitch of the finger or movement of the lips causes the EEG to pick up a signal produced by the brain.
When he scans someone’s brain, Segalowitz will have that person do specific tasks and the resulting signals tend to be “louder” than those of blinking or breathing.
He and his team at Brock have learned how to filter out the background noise of routine brain processes so they can examine signals coming from specific parts of the brain to determine what is going on in someone’s grey matter.
Segalowitz’s job is to take the EEG scans of the children with autistic siblings and try to filter out the noise to see if anything is amiss in how their brains work.
It may be not a simple task because, as any parent knows, children are fussy.
It is relatively easy to ask an adult to sit still during tests to reduce the amount of background signals an EEG might pick up. It’s not as simple with young children. Segalowitz said the signals produced by body movement are large and loud and could “drown out” those produced by a child’s cognitive or emotional responses.
Still, Segalowitz said filtering out the unneeded signals is possible, and he’ll be comparing the scans of children with autistic siblings with those of children with no family history of autism.
He won’t know what they will find, or how useful it will be in diagnosing autism until the work is done. With hundreds of scans, it will be months before the study is complete.
The potential of developing an early test for autism could be extraordinarily useful.
Children diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder can exhibit behavioural problems ranging from the relatively mild to those who are non-verbal. Intensive behavioural intervention, or IBI, is a therapeutic staple for children diagnosed with a disorder on the autism spectrum to improve their communication and social skills. Last year, an expert provincial government panel concluded the therapy is most effective for children under five, making early intervention critical.
Autism Ontario estimates one in 94 people have a disorder on the spectrum. The Niagara chapter serves about 1,000 people, and it has more than 100 participants in its camp programs.