Publications by authors named "Lee M Perry"

Background: Abnormalities in the corpus callosum have been reported in individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), but few studies have evaluated young children. Sex differences in callosal organization and diffusion characteristics have also not been evaluated fully in ASD.

Methods: Structural and diffusion-weighted images were acquired in 139 preschool-aged children with ASD (112 males/27 females) and 82 typically developing (TD) controls (53 males/29 females).

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The fornix is the primary subcortical output fiber system of the hippocampal formation. In children with 22q11.2 deletion syndrome (22q11.

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Frontostriatal circuits have been implicated in reward learning, and emerging findings suggest that frontal white matter structural integrity and probabilistic reward learning are reduced in older age. This cross-sectional study examined whether age differences in frontostriatal white matter integrity could account for age differences in reward learning in a community life span sample of human adults. By combining diffusion tensor imaging with a probabilistic reward learning task, we found that older age was associated with decreased reward learning and decreased white matter integrity in specific pathways running from the thalamus to the medial prefrontal cortex and from the medial prefrontal cortex to the ventral striatum.

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A century of neurology and neuroscience shows that seeing words depends on ventral occipital-temporal (VOT) circuitry. Typically, reading is learned using high-contrast line-contour words. We explored whether a specific VOT region, the visual word form area (VWFA), learns to see only these words or recognizes words independent of the specific shape-defining visual features.

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Diffusion imaging and bound pool fraction (BPF) mapping are two quantitative magnetic resonance imaging techniques that measure microstructural features of the white matter of the brain. Diffusion imaging provides a quantitative measure of the diffusivity of water in tissue. BPF mapping is a quantitative magnetization transfer (qMT) technique that estimates the proportion of exchanging protons bound to macromolecules, such as those found in myelin, and is thus a more direct measure of myelin content than diffusion.

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Diffusion tensor imaging is widely used to evaluate the development of white matter. Information about how alterations in major neurotransmitter systems, such as the dopamine (DA) system, influence this development in healthy children, however, is lacking. Catechol-O-metyltransferase (COMT) is the major enzyme responsible for DA degradation in prefrontal brain structures, for which there is a corresponding genetic polymorphism (val158met) that confers either a more or less efficient version of this enzyme.

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Background: Pregnancy alters the function of many body systems, including the immune system. However, little is known regarding the effect of pregnancy on maternal IgE levels or atopy.

Objective: To determine whether pregnancy consistently influences serum levels of total or allergen specific IgE.

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We describe the case of a child ("S") who was treated with radiation therapy at age 5 for a recurrent malignant brain tumor. Radiation successfully abolished the tumor but caused radiation-induced tissue necrosis, primarily affecting cerebral white matter. S was introduced to us at age 15 because of her profound dyslexia.

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Social inequalities have profound effects on the physical and mental health of children. Children from low socioeconomic status (SES) backgrounds perform below children from higher SES backgrounds on tests of intelligence and academic achievement, and recent findings indicate that low SES (LSES) children are impaired on behavioral measures of prefrontal function. However, the influence of socioeconomic disparity on direct measures of neural activity is unknown.

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