The Ballooning Brain: Defective Genes May Explain Uncontrolled Brain Growth in Autism: ... - 0 views
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linked atypical gene activity to excessive growth in the autistic brain
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autistic brain sprouts an excess of neurons and continues to balloon during the first five years of life, as all those extra neurons grow larger and form connections.
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executive functions"—high-level thinking, such as planning ahead, inhibiting impulses and directing attention.
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In brain tissue from both autistic children and autistic adults, genes coding for proteins that identify and repair mistakes in DNA were expressed at unusually low levels. Additionally, all autistic brains demonstrated unusual activity levels for genes that determine when neurons grow and die and how newborn neurons migrate during early development
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Some genes involved in immune responses, cell-to-cell communication and tissue repair, however, were expressed at unusual levels in adult autistic brains, but not in autistic children's brains
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autistic child develops in the womb, something—an inherited mutation or an environmental factor like a virus, toxin or hormone—muffles the expression of genes coding for proteins that usually fix mistakes in sequences of DNA
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The genetic systems controlling the growth of new neurons go haywire, and brain cells divide much more frequently than usual, accounting for the excess neurons found in the PFC of autistic children.
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If scientists definitively link autism to a characteristic sequence of changes in gene expression and unusual neural growth, then it becomes possible to target and reverse any one of the thousands of steps in that sequence.