Young adults with ASD in the intervention group experienced a reduction in behavior problems over a six month period. There was no change observed for the control group.
Slide of the Week
Richard Davidson, PhD – Slide of the Week
The ability to understand emotional experiences of others, empathy, is a valuable skill for effective social interactions. Various types of training increase empathy in adolescents, but their impact on brain circuits underlying empathy has not been examined. Video games provide a unique medium familiar and engaging to adolescents and can be used to deliver training at scale.
Randy Ashton, PhD – Slide of the Week
Transplantation of human pluripotent stem cell (hPSC)-derived neurons into chick embryos is an established preliminary assay to evaluate engraftment potential. Yet, with recent advances in deriving diverse human neuronal subtypes, optimizing and standardizing such transplantation methodology for specific subtypes at their correlated anatomical sites is still required.
Bradley Christian, PhD – Slide of the Week
Trisomy 21 (Down syndrome; DS) leads to an overproduction of amyloid precursor protein and an increased risk for early Alzheimer’s disease. A study of the natural history of AD-related neuropathology is ongoing to gain an understanding of the distribution and time course of b-amyloid and tau burden in the brains of adults with DS.
Qiang Chang, PhD – Slide of the Week
Astrocytes play an important role in Rett syndrome (RTT) disease progression. Although the non-cell-autonomous effect of RTT astrocytes on neurons was documented, cell-autonomous phenotypes and mechanisms within RTT astrocytes are not well understood. We report that spontaneous calcium activity is abnormal in RTT astrocytes in vitro, in situ, and in vivo.
Murray Brilliant, PhD – Slide of the Week
Defining the full spectrum of human disease associated with a biomarker is necessary to advance the biomarker into clinical practice. We hypothesize that associating biomarker measurements with EHR populations based on shared genetic architectures would establish the clinical epidemiology of the biomarker.
Sriram Boothalingam, PhD – Slide of the Week
The auditory efferent system (ES) originates in the auditory cortex and terminates in the cochlea (inner ear). The activity of the ES has several hypothesized implications for human hearing: facilitating speech understanding in noisy environments, protecting the sensitive inner ear against loud noise, and serving as biological markers of damage in the auditory system.
Lauren Bishop-Fitzpatrick, PhD – Slide of the Week
As a large wave of individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) diagnosed in the 1990s enters adulthood and middle age, knowledge about the patterning of lifetime health problems will become increasingly important for prevention efforts. We retrospectively analyzed diagnostic codes associated with de-identified electronic health records using a machine learning algorithm to characterize diagnostic patterns in decedents with ASD and matched decedent community controls.
Anita Bhattacharyya, PhD – Slide of the Week
Neuropathology of the Down syndrome cerebral cortex includes fewer interneurons in upper cortical layers.
Barbara B. Bendlin, PhD – Slide of the Week
To test the hypothesis that cognitively unimpaired individuals with Alzheimer disease (AD) neuropathology differ from individuals with AD dementia on biomarkers of neurodegeneration, synaptic dysfunction, and glial activation.