Skip to main content
 

Toddlers with autism appear more likely to have an enlarged amygdala, a brain area associated with functions such as the processing of faces and emotion, a study by University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill researchers has found.

Toddlers with autism appear more likely to have an enlarged amygdala, a brain area associated with functions such as the processing of faces and emotion, a study by University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill researchers has found.

In addition, this brain abnormality appears to be associated with the ability to share attention with others, a fundamental ability thought to predict later social and language function in children with autism.

The findings are published in the May issue of the Archives of General Psychiatry. The lead author of the article is Matthew W. Mosconi, Ph.D., of the UNC Neurodevelopmental Disorders Research Center. Joseph Piven, M.D., director of the Carolina Institute for Developmental Disabilities at UNC, is the study’s senior and corresponding author.

“Autism is a complex neurodevelopmental disorder likely involving multiple brain systems,” said Piven,  who is also Sarah Graham Kenan Professor of Psychiatry and Pediatrics in the UNC School of Medicine and in the psychology department of the UNC College of Arts and Sciences.. “Converging evidence from magnetic resonance imaging, head circumference and postmortem studies suggests that brain volume enlargement is a characteristic feature of autism, with its onset most likely occurring in the latter part of the first year of life.” Based both on its function and studies of changes in its structure, the amygdala has been identified as a brain area potentially associated with autism.

Mosconi, Piven and colleagues conducted a magnetic resonance imaging study involving 50 autistic children and 33 control children. The children were given brain scans and tested for certain behavioral features of autism at ages 2 and 4. This included a measure of joint attention, which involves following another person’s gaze to initiate a shared experience.

Compared to the children in the control group, children with autism were more likely to have amygdala enlargement both at age 2 and age 4. “These findings suggest that, consistent with a previous report of head circumference growth rates in autism and studies of amygdala volume in childhood, amygdala growth trajectories are accelerated before age 2 years in autism and remain enlarged during early childhood,” the authors wrote. “Moreover, amygdala enlargement in 2-year-old children with autism is disproportionate to overall brain enlargement and remains disproportionate at age 4 years.”

Among autistic children, amygdala volume was associated with an increase in joint attention ability at age 4. This suggests that alterations to this brain structure may be associated with a core deficit of autism, the authors noted.

“The amygdala plays a critical role in early-stage processing of facial expression and in alerting cortical areas to the emotional significance of an event,” the authors wrote. “Amygdala disturbances early in development, therefore, disrupt the appropriate assignment of emotional significance to faces and social interaction.”

Continued follow-up of research participants, now under way, will help determine whether amygdala growth rates continue at the same rate or undergo another period of accelerated growth or a period of decelerated growth in autistic children after age 4.

Other UNC study co-authors are: Heather Cody-Hazlett, Ph.D., assistant professor, and Rachel Gimpel-Smith, imaging technician, from the UNC School of Medicine’s psychiatry department; Michele D. Poe, Ph.D., an investigator and statistician with the FPG Child Development Institute; and Guido Gerig, Ph.D., adjunct professor in the computer science department in the College of Arts and Sciences.

The study was funded by grants from the National Institutes of Health.

School of Medicine contacts:  Tom Hughes, (919) 966-6047, tahughes@unch.unc.edu; Stephanie Crayton, (919) 966-2860, scrayton@unch.unc.edu

Comments are closed.