A brain structure called the amygdala grows too fast in babies who are diagnosed with a brain disorder at a young age, according to a new study.
The overgrowth occurs between 6 and 12 months of age, before children are typically diagnosed with the disorder.
The American Journal of Psychiatry found that therapies for children at high risk of autism may have the best chance of working if they start in infancy.
An optimal time to start interventions and support children who are at highest likelihood of developing autism may be during the first year of life, according to a study.
The amygdala is an almond-shaped structure deep in the brain that is involved with processing emotions, including feelings of fear.
There is an illustration of brain regions. The image gallery is part of the public domain.
The amygdala appears larger in school-age children with ASD than in children without it, but exactly when this enlargement starts was not known.
There are 10 things you didn't know about the brain.
More than 400 infants were scanned for signs of brain damage, including 270 who were at higher risk of developing the condition because they had an older sibling with it.
The children underwent scans when they were six months, 12 months, and 24 months. By 24 months, 58 children had been diagnosed with the disorder.
All of the children had the same-sized amygdalae at six months of age. The children who would later develop autism had larger amygdalae than the children who didn't.
Those with the fastest rate of amygdala growth had the most severe symptoms.
The study said that the more social difficulties the child showed when diagnosed with autism a year later, the faster the amygdala grew.
The researchers theorize that early problems with visual and sensory information processing may cause stress on the amygdala. The brain sends signals to the amygdala in order to detect threats.
Studies have shown that children that are diagnosed with the condition have problems with how they pay attention to visual stimuli.
Improving visual and other sensory information processing in babies is something that could be done with interventions in babies at high risk of being diagnosed with autism.
According to the National Institutes of Health, early interventions for the condition usually begin around two or three years of age.
Some studies have tested interventions in babies that were at risk for the condition because they had a sibling with it or because they showed early symptoms.
In a small study in the year 2014, an intervention that taught parents new ways of interacting with their babies, such as methods to shift the baby's attention away from an object they were fixated on, was found to reduce the symptoms of autism.
There are related content.
What is the amygdala?
The stages of pregnancy for a baby.
Babies cry in the womb.
The article was published by Live Science. The original article can be found here.
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