Low ‘Empathy’ Response in Brain Might Point to Autism Gene
The Autism News | English
People with autism and their siblings share a similar pattern of reduced activity in an area of the brain associated with empathy, researchers say.
The identification of this so-called ‘biomarker’ for a familial risk for autism could help scientists determine the causes behind the disorder, the new study suggests.
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“The findings provide a springboard to investigate what specific genes are associated with this biomarker. The brain’s response to facial emotion could be a fundamental building block in causing autism and its associated difficulties,” the study’s lead author, Dr. Michael Spencer, from the University of Cambridge Autism Research Centre, said in a university news release.
In conducting the study, published in the July 12 edition of the journal Translational Psychiatry, researchers examined 40 families who had both a teenager with autism and a sibling without the disorder, as well as 40 teenagers with no family history of autism.
The brains of the 120 participants were scanned using functional MRI while they viewed photographs of faces displaying certain emotions or no emotion at all. By comparing brain activity while the participants were looking at different emotions, the researchers could pinpoint the areas of the brain that responded to each one.
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