Project Summary

Naama Barnea-Goraly, M.D. (Young Investigator 2005) of Stanford University, plans to use imaging to study the relationship between disrupted white matter tracts in the brains of children with autism, their siblings and age-matched controls. The research is a continuation of Dr. Barnea-Goraly’s findings from a small scale study of seven autistic children compared with nine controls. The proposed research will replicate, expand and validate these findings. Specifically, the new study will investigate 30 sibling pairs (one with autism, the other without autism), and 25 typically developing control subjects. As siblings share 50 percent of their genes and many environmental variables, the researchers anticipate brain structure in sibling pairs will show less variance than structural measures of unrelated subjects. In addition, the investigators plan to assess the severity of white matter aberrations and social impairment in autism. The findings may help improve the understanding of the neuroanatomical basis underlying deficits in social information processing seen in autism and related disorders.

Program Area: PERVASIVE DEVELOPMENTAL DISORDERS\Autism

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