Autistic Patients Have More Synapses Than Normal

Autism-News

There are many neuropsychiatric disorders, but autism is the only one which is found as an incurable one because of its strong genetic basis. Apart from that in case of the adult autistic patients, the autistic disorders may turn into another brain disorder like epilepsy with symptoms of random seizure.

Although autism can’t be neglected, it can’t be cured as well so, we are trying to find out different diagnostic parameters to get another issues, which are also responsible besides the wrong genomic expressions for autistic disabilities.

 

Different Diagnostic Parameters Were Analyzed:

  • As autism comes from parental genome to offspring, so immunoassay tests are done with the blood samples of mothers bearing an autistic child. The result shows that some fetal brain attacking antibodies are found in autistic child bearing mothers’ blood. And 23% of autism is caused due to this reason.
  • Hormonal imbalance is also found in the children having autistic disabilities. Specially the level of testosterone is found higher in the amniotic fluid of male child bearing mother.

But, as autism is caused due to neuron cell degeneration so we need to study with different brain samples.

First we have to understand the neuronal inter connections. It is like an I.C., in which different kinds of circuits are interconnected and integrated for multifunctional purpose using a single chip. Our brain also works like an I.C. as it integrates all our brain lobes and regions through synapses. So synapses play a huge role in signaling and communicating all over the brain.

A group or chain of synapses correlated with autistic disorder, are found in the cortex ( the outer most region of brain). After the puberty stage or the late adolescence, half of the cortex synapses are reduced in normal or control cases, but it is found that the process is inhibited in case of the patients having autistic brains.

Synapses
Synapses

 

Jeffrey Lieberman, MD, Lawrence C. Kolb, Professor and Chair of Psychiatry at CUMC and director of New York State Psychiatric Institute, said “this is an important finding that could lead to a novel and much-needed therapeutic strategy for autism.”

A test was done taking 13 brain samples of children between the age group of 2 to 9 and another 13 brain samples of participants having the age between 13 to 20 (late adolescence stage). The children and participants were all with autistic disabilities. The synapse density of all the brain samples was measured, and as 22 control brain samples were also preserved for the comparison the result showed that the spine count was depleted by half, whereas in case of autistic brain the count was reduced by only 16 percent.

 

 

 

 

So, spine count which is a process to get the synapse density, proves that the synapse density is increased from children to adults having autistic disorders than the normal people or controls having no autistic disabilities or mental retardation.

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