Publications by authors named "E Courchesne"
Some toddlers with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) have mild social symptoms and developmental improvement in skills, but for others, symptoms and abilities are moderately or even severely affected. Those with profound autism have the most severe social, language, and cognitive symptoms and are at the greatest risk of having a poor developmental outcome. The little that is known about the underlying biology of this important profound autism subtype, points clearly to embryonic dysregulation of proliferation, differentiation and neurogenesis.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFArticle Synopsis
- The study highlights the phenotypic diversity in early language, intellectual, motor, and adaptive functioning among autistic individuals and suggests using subtype labels to better distinguish their differences beyond the standard autism diagnosis.
- Researchers identified two distinct autism subtypes based on early LIMA features, using advanced clustering methods on data from 615 children, revealing differing developmental trajectories between these types.
- The identified subtypes, Type I and Type II, can be reliably detected with 98% accuracy and show significant variations in neuroimaging characteristics and gene expression, indicating their biological differences.
Article Synopsis
- Autism and ADHD are complex neurodevelopmental disorders with overlapping features, but they are rarely studied together, especially regarding sex differences.
- The study utilized a large neuroimaging dataset to analyze cortical anatomy linked to autism and ADHD, revealing specific patterns in brain structure for each condition.
- Findings showed that autism presented with greater cortical thickness in specific areas, while ADHD had more global increases in thickness but lower volume and surface area; also, unique patterns were observed in individuals with both conditions.
Language and social symptoms improve with age in some autistic toddlers, but not in others, and such outcome differences are not clearly predictable from clinical scores alone. Here we aim to identify early-age brain alterations in autism that are prognostic of future language ability. Leveraging 372 longitudinal structural MRI scans from 166 autistic toddlers and 109 typical toddlers and controlling for brain size, we find that, compared to typical toddlers, autistic toddlers show differentially larger or thicker temporal and fusiform regions; smaller or thinner inferior frontal lobe and midline structures; larger callosal subregion volume; and smaller cerebellum.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Social affective and communication symptoms are central to autism spectrum disorder (ASD), yet their severity differs across toddlers: Some toddlers with ASD display improving abilities across early ages and develop good social and language skills, while others with "profound" autism have persistently low social, language and cognitive skills and require lifelong care. The biological origins of these opposite ASD social severity subtypes and developmental trajectories are not known.
Methods: Because ASD involves early brain overgrowth and excess neurons, we measured size and growth in 4910 embryonic-stage brain cortical organoids (BCOs) from a total of 10 toddlers with ASD and 6 controls (averaging 196 individual BCOs measured/subject).