Mental Health News

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Scientists have found that the brains of Autistic children have specific abnormalities.  Mental health disorders such as autism have been on the increase lately, whether it’s a result of more accurate diagnosing of conditions or as they say, something in the water is still under discussion.  Yet, it certainly has more researchers paying attention to the children’s mental health these days.

Researchers found in the case of autistic children that there is more gray matter in the areas of the brain that control social processing and sight-based learning than in children without autism.  In order to make this discovery researchers combined two imaging techniques that involve tracking the motion of water molecules in the brain and pinpointing the small changes in gray matter volume between 13 year old boys with high-functioning autism or Asperger Syndrome and 12 healthy kids with an average age of 11 years old.  How they got the kids to sit still for the involved procedure is still a mystery!

In the case of mental health disorders such as autism, these children had enlarged gray matter in the parietal lobes of their brains, which are linked to the mirror neuron system of cells that are associated with empathy, emotional experiences and sight based learning.  The autistic children also had less gray matter volume in the right amygdala regions of their brains and that the decreases in volume in this region of the brain correlate to the degree of impaired social interaction per child.

Autism is considered one of the fastest growing mental health disorders involving developmental disability in the US.  It usually appears in the child’s first 3 years of life and impairs social skills and communication skills.