August 16, 2006 -- Study Finds Autism Affects Entire Brain

A study reported in the August 2006 issue of the journal Child Neuropsychology strongly suggests that autism is a disorder in which the various parts of the brain have trouble working together to accomplish complex tasks. That is different from previous thinking about autism—that it’s primarily a disorder of social interaction--and suggests that both children and adults with autism have abnormalities in brain circuitry that prevent various parts of the brain from interacting. This would explain, researchers said, why children with autism in the current study did well on tasks that require only one region of the brain at a time but had difficulty with complex tasks. “Our paper strongly suggests that autism is not primarily a disorder of social interaction, but a global disorder affecting how the brain processes the information it receives—especially when the information becomes complicated,” said Dr. Nancy Minshew, senior author of the study. The study was conducted by researchers in the Collaborative Program of Excellence in Autism, a research network funded by the National Institute of Child Health and Development and the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders.