Autism develops in children before they are born, according to a study by US researchers.
The researchers analysed 25 genes in post-mortem brain tissue of children with and without autism. These included genes that serve as biomarkers for brain cell types in different layers of the cortex, genes implicated in autism and several control genes.
“Building a baby’s brain during pregnancy involves creating a cortex that contains six layers,” said Eric Courchesne, professor of neurosciences and director of the Autism Center of Excellence at UC San Diego. “We discovered focal patches of disrupted development of these cortical layers in the majority of children with autism.”
Fellow researcher Ed S. Lein, of the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle, added: “The most surprising finding was the similar early developmental pathology across nearly all of the autistic brains, especially given the diversity of symptoms in patients with autism, as well as the extremely complex genetics behind the disorder.”
During early brain development, each cortical layer develops its own specific types of brain cells, each with specific patterns of brain connectivity that perform unique and important roles in processing information. As a brain cell develops into a specific type in a specific layer with specific connections, it acquires a distinct genetic signature or “marker” that can be observed.
The study, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, found that in the brains of children with autism key genetic markers were absent in brain cells in multiple layers. “This defect indicates that the crucial early developmental step of creating six distinct layers with specific types of brain cells – something that begins in prenatal life – had been disrupted,” Courchesne said.
Equally important, said the scientists, these early developmental defects were present in focal patches of cortex, suggesting the defect is not uniform throughout the cortex. The brain regions most affected by focal patches of absent gene markers were the frontal and the temporal cortex, which are associated with higher-order brain function, such as complex communication and comprehension of social cues, and with language respectively.
The disruptions of frontal and temporal cortical layers may underlie symptoms most often displayed in autistic spectrum disorders. The visual cortex – an area of the brain associated with perception that tends to be spared in autism – displayed no abnormalities.
“The fact that we were able to find these patches is remarkable, given that the cortex is roughly the size of the surface of a basketball, and we only examined pieces of tissue the size of a pencil eraser,” said Lein. “This suggests that these abnormalities are quite pervasive across the surface of the cortex.”
Courchesne added that the finding that these defects occur in patches rather than across the entirety of cortex gives hope as well as insight about the nature of autism.
Such patchy defects, as opposed to uniform cortical pathology, may help explain why many toddlers with autism show clinical improvement with early treatment and over time, according to the scientists. The findings support the idea that in children with autism the brain can sometimes rewire connections to circumvent early focal defects, raising hope that understanding these patches may eventually open new avenues to explore how that improvement occurs.
