Radiology Imaging Laboratory

A new, small study provides a tantalizing clue to the causes of autism, suggesting that children with the disorder have heavier brains and an overabundance of brain cells called neurons.

Autism researchers had suspected for more than a decade that the disorder might be the result of abnormal brain growth and development. Previous studies have shown that autistic children have larger heads and brains, and that brain regions crucial for social, emotional, and communication processing are particularly overgrown. But this study is the first to provide hard evidence of brain development gone awry in autistic children, gleaned from actual counts of these brain cells.

Read the story from ABC News here.

“We’re studying brain structure and trying to understand how the architecture of the brain supports our behavior, our thoughts, our memories, our way of thinking,” says neuroanatomist Jacopo Annese.

Annese heads the Brain Observatory at the University of California, San Diego. It’s where he and his team look for connections by mapping brain structure and connecting it to human behavior. Support from the National Science Foundation (NSF) helped Annese launch the Digital Brain Library back in 2008 when he acquired the brain of a man who couldn’t remember anything for more than 20 seconds. Since then he has acquired about 35 donated brains and has been examining their physical characteristics.

Read the news release from the National Science Foundation here.

Toddlers with autism are more likely to have abnormal synchronization between certain brain areas than other kids the same age, even those with language delays, according to a new study at the University of California, San Diego. It is published in the journal Neuron.

”There seems to be impaired or reduced synchronization between the right and left hemispheres, specifically the areas involved in language and communication,” says researcher Ilan Dinstein, PhD, a postdoctoral fellow at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel. The researchers found only a link between the abnormality and autism, not cause and effect, Dinstein says. Still, the discovery may someday help experts develop tools to diagnose the condition earlier, he says.

Autism and autism spectrum disorder are a range of neurodevelopmental disorders marked by difficulties in social and communication skills and repetitive behavior. About one in 110 U.S. children are affected, according to CDC estimates.

Read the news release from WebMD here.

Veterans suffering the invisible wounds of war cannot show proof of their injuries like someone with broken bones or missing limbs. New research in San Diego is finding ways to measure the physical evidence of a signature injury of the current wars: traumatic brain injury.

Read the full story here.

Eva-Marie Fredric thought her then-14-year-old son, Dylan, could handle the task of packing for their trip to the mountains. But when the two arrived at the campsite, she found the tent — but no tent poles. “We slept outside on an inflated air mattress, freezing our bums off, with the dog huddled between us,” recalls the L.A.-based writer and producer.

Teens often frustrate their parents with their inability to remember key information and keep track of their stuff. Part of the problem is that their brains are not developed enough to do these things consistently and well, says Doris Trauner, MD, professor of neurosciences and chief of pediatric neurology at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine.

Read the full story here.

A project begun three years ago in San Diego to discern post-traumatic stress disorder from traumatic brain injury is blossoming into a landmark study drawing national attention.

Back then, the most widely used brain-scanning devices of the time couldn’t reliably tell the two apart more than half the time, which complicated treatment, since the separate conditions require distinct care.

Now, through research arising from the VA San Diego Healthcare System, the correct diagnosis is possible 90 percent of the time, said medical researcher Mingxiong Huang.

Read the full story here.

Bette Ferguson has been alive for 92 years, and her ability to remember the cities she’s lived in, jobs she’s worked and, yes, all the men she’s married, makes her very valuable to Jacopo Annese, a neuroanatomist at the University of California, San Diego. Annese is director of The Brain Observatory, a research center at UCSD where brains are sliced up, laid out on slides and then scanned into digital images, which researchers can use to visualize what a variety of brains look like. Scientists can use Annese’s images to see how diseases like Alzheimer’s physically change the brain.

Now, Annese is looking to expand his library. He wants to collect, slice and digitize 1,000 brains from a variety of donors to illustrate how diseases like Alzheimer’s, tremors and cancer impact the brain’s makeup. He’s also interested in people like Ferguson, who called Annese and offered her brain after reading about him in the newspaper. Because Ferguson can remember just about everything that has happened in her life, Annese wants to see what an aged but disease-free brain looks like.

Read the full story here.

For obvious reasons, humans are utterly fascinated with what makes us, well, human. Put another way, our brains want to know more about themselves. But studying this jellied, three-pound organ perched atop our spine has historically been problematic. How do you compare what has been learned about human behavior and disease with the actual organ, which clearly can’t be examined in direct, microscopic detail while still in use by its owner?

Read the full story here.

Also, you may visit The Brain Observatory website here.

Combining the cutting-edge technologies of MRI and MEG, scientists at the University of California, San Diego show that babies just over a year old process words they hear with the same brain structures as adults, and in the same amount of time. Moreover, the researchers found that babies were not merely processing the words as sounds, but were capable of grasping their meaning.

Read the news release from Science Daily here.

NFL Charities, the charitable foundation of the National Football League owners, has awarded more than $1.6 million in grants to support sports-related medical research at 16 organizations, the NFL announced today. Of these grants, a percentage will go to a team of researchers at UC San Diego School of Medicine who are studying novel methods of detecting brain injury.

The research project led by Mingxiong Huang, PhD, professor and associate director of the MEG Radiology Imaging Laboratory in the UCSD Department of Radiology, will develop a new neuro-imaging technique using Magnetoencephalography (MEG) and Diffusion Tensor Imaging (DTI) for detecting neuronal injuries.

Read the news release here.