A research collaboration called EU-AIMS will scan hundreds of brains and could lead to the first drug treatments for autism
Much of today's research involves big data and big projects – think of the thousands of physicists working at the Large Hadron Collider, or the global collaboration that was integral to the success of the Human Genome Project. In the field of psychiatry, however, large-scale research is still in its infancy. So despite the fact that one in every hundred people is affected by autism – for which there is no effective treatment – there was no European strategy to coordinate research or drug discovery.
To help remedy this, the EU-AIMS consortium was set up to bring together researchers under the largest single grant for autism in the world. Later this year, the Institute of Psychiatry in London, Cambridge University, and four other research centres across Europe will begin brain scanning for one of the consortium's major clinical projects. The goal is to scan the brains of 450 people with autism and 300 controls using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). Nothing of this size has been attempted before, and the hope is that it will pave the way for new treatments for autism and facilitate earlier diagnosis.
Autism is notoriously difficult to characterise, partly because of the wide spectrum of people it encompasses and also because its medical definition is still evolving. Leo Kanner, an American child psychiatrist, was the first to use the word "autism" in its modern sense in 1943, and his description of children with difficulties understanding social situations, coupled with language problems and obsessive interests (in things like numbers, patterns or spinning objects), still largely holds today.
The autism spectrum is extremely wide, ranging from those who can lead independent lives (and may even benefit from certain autistic traits, for example in scientific professions), to those with severe learning difficulties who can barely function in our highly social world. The net is so wide that some researchers prefer to think in terms of different "autisms" rather than a single autism.
The EU-AIMS study is designed to be large enough to take a biological snapshot of the different colours in this spectrum. The brains of children, teenagers and adults will be scanned, with a follow-up two years later, capturing changes over the whole human lifespan without having to wait for a 30-year, "longitudinal" study to finish.
Although many of the symptoms of autism have their origin in brain processes, our current diagnosis is still based on behaviour. MRI allows us to move upstream from behaviour to neurobiology, and to tie a link between the two.
For example, people with autism have difficulty reading facial expressions and this can be examined by showing a person a series of faces on a screen while they are lying in a scanner. A consistent pattern of brain activity can be seen in non-autistic people when distinguishing between happy, sad and neutral faces, but people with autism struggle with this kind of emotion recognition. The scanner lets us examine how their brain circuits differ.
Ultimately, MRI may provide useful biological footprints or "biomarkers" for autism, which will be essential for tracking the effectiveness of new drugs.
Using an animal model of autism, EU-AIMS has already identified a possible drug target on synapses – the connections between nerve cells – where a particular brain receptor was found to be produced in excess in an animal model of autism. The findings, which were published in the journal Science, are now being translated into clinical research, where MRI biomarkers will come into their own.
The consortium also aims to shed light on the bigger picture of what happens in autism. Previously, a number of hypotheses have been proposed, including Theory of Mind, which suggests that those with autism have difficulty putting themselves in the mind of another person. This was famously shown in the Sally-Ann task where a child watches as a doll (Sally) places a marble in a basket and then Sally leaves the room. While Sally is gone, another doll (Anne) moves the marble into a box. When Sally returns, the child is asked where she will look for her marble. By the age of six, most children are able to place themselves in the mind of Sally to give the correct answer (the basket), but autistic children struggle with this task until much later in life.
The brain processes involved in Theory of Mind are extremely complex, so in order to strike a balance between examining high-level theories and finding new drug targets, simpler tests of cognitive and sensory processes will be part of the EU-AIMS study. These include tasks that are straightforward enough to be run in parallel with research using animal models. Many of these experiments are designed to be suitable for a wide range of ages and abilities, which will be essential to see if certain problems are shared by everyone who has autism, or whether they are limited to people on particular parts of the spectrum.
Another interesting component of the study is the use of "eye-tracking" technology, which allows us to see the world from the perspective of someone with autism. When presented with pictures of faces, people with autism tend to look only fleetingly at the eyes, and eye-tracking experiments can accurately pick this up. Young autistic children also tend to have a greater preference for abstract images over social images, so eye-tracking could provide another useful biomarker for the condition.
In an era of big science projects, autism research has come late to the table, but with its goal of scanning more than 700 people across Europe it is catching up. The EU-AIMS consortium promises to give us one of the most comprehensive accounts to date of the strengths and shortcomings of the autistic mind at many different points on the spectrum, and will ultimately pave the way for some of the first effective treatments.
*Laurence O'Dwyer* is a researcher at the Donders Centre for Cognitive Neuroscience, Radboud University in Nijmegen, the Netherlands. He is the coordinator of the Accelerated Longitudinal Study in Autism for the EU-AIMS consortium
To learn more about EU-AIMS watch this presentation on YouTube Reported by guardian.co.uk 5 hours ago.
Much of today's research involves big data and big projects – think of the thousands of physicists working at the Large Hadron Collider, or the global collaboration that was integral to the success of the Human Genome Project. In the field of psychiatry, however, large-scale research is still in its infancy. So despite the fact that one in every hundred people is affected by autism – for which there is no effective treatment – there was no European strategy to coordinate research or drug discovery.
To help remedy this, the EU-AIMS consortium was set up to bring together researchers under the largest single grant for autism in the world. Later this year, the Institute of Psychiatry in London, Cambridge University, and four other research centres across Europe will begin brain scanning for one of the consortium's major clinical projects. The goal is to scan the brains of 450 people with autism and 300 controls using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). Nothing of this size has been attempted before, and the hope is that it will pave the way for new treatments for autism and facilitate earlier diagnosis.
Autism is notoriously difficult to characterise, partly because of the wide spectrum of people it encompasses and also because its medical definition is still evolving. Leo Kanner, an American child psychiatrist, was the first to use the word "autism" in its modern sense in 1943, and his description of children with difficulties understanding social situations, coupled with language problems and obsessive interests (in things like numbers, patterns or spinning objects), still largely holds today.
The autism spectrum is extremely wide, ranging from those who can lead independent lives (and may even benefit from certain autistic traits, for example in scientific professions), to those with severe learning difficulties who can barely function in our highly social world. The net is so wide that some researchers prefer to think in terms of different "autisms" rather than a single autism.
The EU-AIMS study is designed to be large enough to take a biological snapshot of the different colours in this spectrum. The brains of children, teenagers and adults will be scanned, with a follow-up two years later, capturing changes over the whole human lifespan without having to wait for a 30-year, "longitudinal" study to finish.
Although many of the symptoms of autism have their origin in brain processes, our current diagnosis is still based on behaviour. MRI allows us to move upstream from behaviour to neurobiology, and to tie a link between the two.
For example, people with autism have difficulty reading facial expressions and this can be examined by showing a person a series of faces on a screen while they are lying in a scanner. A consistent pattern of brain activity can be seen in non-autistic people when distinguishing between happy, sad and neutral faces, but people with autism struggle with this kind of emotion recognition. The scanner lets us examine how their brain circuits differ.
Ultimately, MRI may provide useful biological footprints or "biomarkers" for autism, which will be essential for tracking the effectiveness of new drugs.
Using an animal model of autism, EU-AIMS has already identified a possible drug target on synapses – the connections between nerve cells – where a particular brain receptor was found to be produced in excess in an animal model of autism. The findings, which were published in the journal Science, are now being translated into clinical research, where MRI biomarkers will come into their own.
The consortium also aims to shed light on the bigger picture of what happens in autism. Previously, a number of hypotheses have been proposed, including Theory of Mind, which suggests that those with autism have difficulty putting themselves in the mind of another person. This was famously shown in the Sally-Ann task where a child watches as a doll (Sally) places a marble in a basket and then Sally leaves the room. While Sally is gone, another doll (Anne) moves the marble into a box. When Sally returns, the child is asked where she will look for her marble. By the age of six, most children are able to place themselves in the mind of Sally to give the correct answer (the basket), but autistic children struggle with this task until much later in life.
The brain processes involved in Theory of Mind are extremely complex, so in order to strike a balance between examining high-level theories and finding new drug targets, simpler tests of cognitive and sensory processes will be part of the EU-AIMS study. These include tasks that are straightforward enough to be run in parallel with research using animal models. Many of these experiments are designed to be suitable for a wide range of ages and abilities, which will be essential to see if certain problems are shared by everyone who has autism, or whether they are limited to people on particular parts of the spectrum.
Another interesting component of the study is the use of "eye-tracking" technology, which allows us to see the world from the perspective of someone with autism. When presented with pictures of faces, people with autism tend to look only fleetingly at the eyes, and eye-tracking experiments can accurately pick this up. Young autistic children also tend to have a greater preference for abstract images over social images, so eye-tracking could provide another useful biomarker for the condition.
In an era of big science projects, autism research has come late to the table, but with its goal of scanning more than 700 people across Europe it is catching up. The EU-AIMS consortium promises to give us one of the most comprehensive accounts to date of the strengths and shortcomings of the autistic mind at many different points on the spectrum, and will ultimately pave the way for some of the first effective treatments.
*Laurence O'Dwyer* is a researcher at the Donders Centre for Cognitive Neuroscience, Radboud University in Nijmegen, the Netherlands. He is the coordinator of the Accelerated Longitudinal Study in Autism for the EU-AIMS consortium
To learn more about EU-AIMS watch this presentation on YouTube Reported by guardian.co.uk 5 hours ago.