Friday, 2 March 2007
9:00 - 10:00 AM

The Seminar will be held in the Gonda Center First Floor Conference Room, Rm 1357
E5 on the South sector of the UCLA Campus Map.

All are welcome!

For further information contact Candace Wilkinson at (310) 825-9041.

Due to the relatively late age of clinical diagnosis of autism, the early brain pathology of children with autism has remained largely unstudied. The increased use of retrospective measures such as head circumference and a surge of MRI studies of toddlers with autism have opened a whole new area of research and discovery. Recent studies have now shown that abnormal brain overgrowth occurs during the first 2 years of life in children with autism. By 2-4 years of age, the most deviant overgrowth is in cerebral, cerebellar, and limbic structures that underlie higher-order cognitive, social, emotional, and language functions. Excessive growth is followed by abnormally slow or arrested growth. Deviant brain growth in autism occurs at the very time when the formation of cerebral circuitry is at its most exuberant and vulnerable stage, and it may signal disruption of this process of circuit formation. The resulting aberrant connectivity and dysfunction may lead to the development of autistic behaviors. Abnormal functioning in these cerebral and cerebellar structures has been shown in autistic toddlers for the first time in recent unpublished fMRI studies. To discover the causes, neural substrates, early-warning signs and effective treatments of autism, future research should focus on elucidating the neurobiological defects that underlie brain growth abnormalities in autism that appear during these critical first years of life.

Recent related publications:
Courchesne E, Pierce K. Brain overgrowth in autism during a critical time in development: implications for frontal pyramidal neuron and interneuron development and connectivity. Int J Dev Neurosci 2005;23(2-3):153-170.

Courchesne E, Pierce K. Why the frontal cortex in autism might be talking only to itself: local over-connectivity but long-distance disconnection. Curr Opin Neurobiol 2005;15(2):225-230.

Courchesne E, Redcay E, Morgan JT, Kennedy DP. Autism at the beginning: microstructural and growth abnormalities underlying the cognitive and behavioral phenotype of autism. Dev Psychopathol 2005;17(3):577-597.

Redcay E, Courchesne E. When is the brain enlarged in autism? A meta-analysis of all brain size reports. Biol Psychiatry 2005;58(1):1-9.

Teder-Salejarvi WA, Pierce KL, Courchesne E, Hillyard SA. Auditory spatial localization and attention deficits in autistic adults. Brain Res Cogn Brain Res 2005;23(2-3):221-234.

DiCicco-Bloom E, Lord C, Zwaigenbaum L, Courchesne E, Dager SR, Schmitz C, Schultz RT, Crawley J, Young LJ. The developmental neurobiology of autism spectrum disorder. J Neurosci 2006;26(26):6897-6906.

Kennedy DP, Redcay E, Courchesne E. Failing to deactivate: resting functional abnormalities in autism. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A 2006;103(21):8275-8280.