Vocal and Facial Behavior During Affect Production in Autism Spectrum Disorder.

Purpose: We investigate the extent to which automated audiovisual metrics extracted during an affect production task show statistically significant differences between a cohort of children diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and typically developing controls.

Method: Forty children with ASD and 21 neurotypical controls interacted with a multimodal conversational platform with a virtual agent, Tina, who guided them through tasks prompting facial and vocal communication of four emotions-happy, angry, sad, and afraid-under conditions of high and low verbal and social cognitive task demands.

Results: Individuals with ASD exhibited greater standard deviation of the fundamental frequency of the voice with the minima and maxima of the pitch contour occurring at an earlier time point as compared to controls.

Re-Assessing the Role of Platelet Activating Factor and Its Inflammatory Signaling and Inhibitors in Cancer and Anti-Cancer Strategies.

Since 2000s, we have outlined the multifaceted role of inflammation in several aspects of cancer, via specific inflammatory mediators, including the platelet activating factor (PAF) and PAF-receptor (PAFR) related signaling, which affect important inflammatory junctions and cellular interactions that are associated with tumor-related inflammatory manifestations. It is now well established that disease-related unresolved chronic inflammatory responses can promote carcinogenesis. At the same time, tumors themselves are able to promote their progression and metastasis, by triggering an inflammation-related vicious cycle, in which PAF and its signaling play crucial role(s), which usually conclude in tumor growth and angiogenesis.

Prenatal exposure to hypoxic risk conditions in autistic and neurotypical youth: Associated ventricular differences, sleep disturbance, and sensory processing.

There is a growing body of research that suggests conditions during the period of pregnancy and birth can affect how autism spectrum disorder (ASD) presents itself. This study aimed to investigate the incidence of oxygen deprivation during this period known as prenatal and perinatal hypoxic risk (HR) conditions in ASD compared with neurotypical control (NTC) youth. We also examined ventricular morphology variations associated with HR exposure, and to evaluate associations with clinical symptoms.

Beyond words: an investigation of fine motor skills and the verbal communication spectrum in autism.

Introduction: This study investigated the associations between fine motor skills and expressive verbal abilities in a group of 97 autistic participants (age 8-17, mean=12.41) and 46 typically developing youth (age 8-17, mean=12.48).