A functional magnetic resonance imaging scan. NeuroscienceNews image is adapted from the Rutgers press release.
Neuromotor function is often impaired on children and adults on the Autism Spectrum. While it is often seen as coinciding symptoms, researcher’s at Rutgers have linked neuro-motor function at the core of ASD. This may have a gravitational impact on the way we choose effective treatment options for our clients:
The findings, published recently in Nature Scientific Reports, are contrary to the conventional medical understanding of autism – that it is a mental illness and that neuromotor problems, while often occurring at the same time as autism, are not at its biological core.
“For the first time, we can demonstrate unambiguously that motor issues are core issues that need to be included in the diagnosis criteria for autism,” says Elizabeth Torres, an associate professor of psychology in the School of Arts and Sciences and co-author of the study. Her co-author, Kristina Denisova, a former Rutgers graduate student in psychology, is now an assistant clinical research professor at Columbia University.
According to Torres, psychotropic drugs are routinely prescribed for children on the autism spectrum, even though they’re designed for adults. “Our findings underline the need for clinical trials to determine the effects of these medications on the children’s neuromotor development,” she says. “Doctors should think twice about prescribing such medications for children and parents should insist that they think twice.”
Torres used a new algorithm invented at Rutgers, part of a Statistical Platform for Individualized Behavior Analysis (SPIBA), to analyze the data from functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans of 1,048 people, aged 6 to 50, including people with autism spectrum disorders (ASD), and examined the motor patterns as a function of psychotropic medication intake. The resting state fMRI data came from two publicly available databases that Denisova processed to obtain the participants’ involuntary head motions as they tried to lie still in the magnet.
Read the full article here.