How to capture the real onset patterns of autism

Can you give me, and I know this is going to be hard, but maybe just like the top line of what we discovered.

I think it's sometimes hard for families to see the progress that's been made because they still have, everybody still has a struggle, right? But what science has given them.

So I would love to have you give just kind of like what we know now that we didn't know 20 years ago kind of overview.

So one of the things that we've been studying in some detail prior to the venture into studying siblings was the emerging social brain or social brain network.

And this refers to a group of structures Yeah, both within the overlying cortex, some around your ear, the temporal lobes, and subcortical structures, which are specifically interested and specifically seem to be tuned up or become tuned up for social stimuli like faces, voices, predicting people's intentions, and so on.

All the things that the viewers of this podcast are doing, actually, to understand what's going on here.

You know, and given the social difficulties that are sometimes present in autism, this seemed like the obvious first place for us to start to look when we began to study these infants at elevated likelihood for autism.

And so we did several studies in the 2000, well, sort of 2005 to 2010. to 2015 kind of era where we specifically, you know, used some of the paradigms that we developed with neurotypical to look at these emerging social brain functions.

For example, we had specific paradigms to look at face processing, and Tessel will be telling us more about that.

Later on, we also had paradigms where we just had infants look at strongly social videos with a nice sort of lady doing Incy Wincy Spider and other kinds of hand, you know, sort of maximal social stimulus with hand gestures and facial expressions and so on.

This is control stimuli, non-social control stimuli, and other experiments with human vocal sounds versus non-vocal sounds.

And roughly speaking, well, yes, we used technologies such as fMRI, functional MRI, fNIRS, or optical imaging.

and EEG or ERP.

And using all those different methods and looking at all of these different aspects of social brain function, we did in fact find that early atypicalities, some of those early atypicalities in the social brain sort of extended to the whole group of infant sibling babies.

Others were more specifically related to those who went on to get a later diagnosis of autism.

And so that led us early on to this quite attractive and relatively simple story, or scientifically simple story, that there might be something atypical about the early emergence of the social brain.

But then we went on to investigate other things, sensory and motor functions.

And I'll probably pass over to Emily to... to talk a bit more about the sensory and motor studies, well, mainly sensory studies that we've been doing.

Yeah.

So I think, you know, as Mark said, coming into the field, there was an idea that we'd see these big social differences and we do see some in the brain.

But also what we see generally over the first three years is that actually, you know, by five to six months, infants with later autism are often just as sociable as other babies.

But what happens over three years is that that drops away.

So we see this sort of gradual change in their behavioral social interests or social attention.

And at first we were looking, as Mark explained, lots of markers of social brain function to see whether that maybe, you know, preceded this change in their social behavior.

And we do find some of those.