Click here to view some of Dr. Courchesne's most recent work

Autism and Developmental Disorders Colloquium Series

"Autism in the Beginning: What Goes Wrong with Brain Growth
and Function in the First Years of Life"

Eric Courchesne, Ph.D.

Professor of Neuroscience, Neuroscience Department, University of California San Diego
School of Medicine

6:00 pm, Wednesday, September 20, 2006
MIT Building 46-3002 (auditorium), followed by a reception

Building Address: 43 Vassar Street, Cambridge, MA 02139

Hosted by John Gabrieli, Ph.D., and the Brain Development and Disorders Project at MIT

Supported by the Simons Foundation, the Anne and Paul Marcus Family Foundation, and the Autism Treatment Network

Colloquia sponsored by the Autism Consortium

Please RSVP to lmavros@mit.edu

Due to the relatively late age of clinical diagnosis of autism, the early brain pathology of children with autism has remained largely unstudied. The increased use of retrospective measures such as head circumference along with a surge of MRI studies of toddlers with autism, have opened a whole new area of research and discovery. Recent studies have now shown that abnormal brain overgrowth occurs during the first 2 years of life in children with autism. By 2­4 years of age, the most deviant overgrowth is in cerebral, cerebellar, and limbic structures that underlie higher-order cognitive, social, emotional, and language functions. Excessive growth is followed by abnormally slow or arrested growth. Deviant brain growth in autism occurs at the very time when the formation of cerebral circuitry is at its most exuberant and vulnerable stage, and it may signal disruption of this process of circuit formation. The resulting aberrant connectivity and dysfunction may lead to the development of autistic behaviors. Abnormal functioning in these cerebral and cerebellar structures has been shown in autistic toddlers for the first time in recent unpublished fMRI studies. To discover the causes, neural substrates, early-warning signs and effective treatments of autism, future research should focus on elucidating the neurobiological defects that underlie brain growth abnormalities in autism that appear during these critical first years of life.