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Wednesday, July 16, 2003"During this period of important learning and plasticity, when the brain is experiencing the world and deciding how to construct itself, it's growing too fast in the infant with autism," said senior author Eric Courchesne. He is a professor of neurosciences at the University of California-San Diego, and director of the Center for Autism Research at Children's Hospital and Health Center in that city. "Without the guidance of experience and learning, the brain may be creating abnormal connections that make it very hard for autistic children to make sense of the world they live in," he added. The accelerated brain growth occurs well before the first clinical signs of autism, and appears to predict the severity of the condition later in childhood, as well as the degree of brain abnormality at a later age. The full study is here (available in its entirety - for free). It's an interesting hypothesis, but it remains just that - a hypothesis. The study only looked at head circumference measurements of autistic children, then compared the data to national averages. A better study would have been to compare the head circumference measurements between the autistic group and the same number of children without autism from the same geographical area. There very well could be a subset of normal children whose head circumference grows rapidly in infancy, too. But you can't tell that from this study. And there's an even more fundamental problem with the study. The autistic children's head circumferences were within two standard deviations of the mean for normal head circumferences. Usually, two standard deviations from the mean are required to make a significant difference. Not exactly ground-breaking work. posted by Sydney on 7/16/2003 07:23:00 AM 0 comments 0 Comments: |
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