DogwoodTree
Still here...
Just came across this article...thought I'd share.
http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/10/the-invisible-women-with-autism/410806/
Quote from the article:
The multisite project that Pelphrey leads is making headway into learning how girls with autism are different—both by recording their behavior and by scanning their brains. For example, one of the cardinal observations about autism is that people with the condition seem uninterested in, or at least disengaged from, social interactions. Intriguing brain-imaging evidence from Pelphrey’s lab suggests that this is true only for boys with autism.
“The most surprising thing—it might not be surprising to the clinicians out there, but to the scientists—is that we’re seeing strong social-brain activation or function in girls with autism, which is, strictly speaking, counter to everything we’ve reported ourselves and other groups have reported,” says Pelphrey. “Their social brains seem to be intact.”
The social brain is an interconnected set of brain regions, including the face-processing fusiform gyrus; the amygdala, an emotion hub; and the superior temporal sulcus, which tracks other people’s attention and movements. Imaging studies have reported that the social brain is underactive in people with autism, but Pelphrey’s lab has found that if typical girls have the most active social brains and boys with autism the least active, typical boys would tie with girls who have autism somewhere in the middle. “That kind of blew us away,” he says.
Particularly interesting is the unpublished observation that in girls with autism, the social brain seems to communicate with the prefrontal cortex, a brain region that normally engages in reason and planning, and is known to burn through energy. It may be that women with autism keep their social brain engaged, but mediate it through the prefrontal cortex—in a sense, intellectualizing social interactions that would be intuitive for other women.
“That suggests compensation,” Pelphrey says. It also jibes with women like Maya saying they have learned the rules of social interactions, but find it draining to act on them all day. “It’s exhausting because it’s like you’re doing math all day,” Pelphrey says.
Pelphrey is right that this finding isn’t entirely a surprise to clinicians. Some scientists who regularly see women with autism have picked up on their remarkable ability to learn the rules enough to camouflage their symptoms—the way Maya has learned to. (“I don’t like making eye contact,” Maya says. “I do it because I have to and I know it’s appropriate.”)
This means clinicians have to be more creative when diagnosing women on the spectrum, rather than simply looking for, say, repetitive behavior, as they might with men. “Without their self-report telling you how stressful it is to maintain appearances, you wouldn’t really know,” says Francesca Happé, the director of the MRC Centre at King’s College London. “They have good imitation, good intonation in their language, body language—surface behavior isn’t very useful for a diagnosis, at least for a certain set of women on the spectrum.”
http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/10/the-invisible-women-with-autism/410806/
Quote from the article:
The multisite project that Pelphrey leads is making headway into learning how girls with autism are different—both by recording their behavior and by scanning their brains. For example, one of the cardinal observations about autism is that people with the condition seem uninterested in, or at least disengaged from, social interactions. Intriguing brain-imaging evidence from Pelphrey’s lab suggests that this is true only for boys with autism.
“The most surprising thing—it might not be surprising to the clinicians out there, but to the scientists—is that we’re seeing strong social-brain activation or function in girls with autism, which is, strictly speaking, counter to everything we’ve reported ourselves and other groups have reported,” says Pelphrey. “Their social brains seem to be intact.”
The social brain is an interconnected set of brain regions, including the face-processing fusiform gyrus; the amygdala, an emotion hub; and the superior temporal sulcus, which tracks other people’s attention and movements. Imaging studies have reported that the social brain is underactive in people with autism, but Pelphrey’s lab has found that if typical girls have the most active social brains and boys with autism the least active, typical boys would tie with girls who have autism somewhere in the middle. “That kind of blew us away,” he says.
Particularly interesting is the unpublished observation that in girls with autism, the social brain seems to communicate with the prefrontal cortex, a brain region that normally engages in reason and planning, and is known to burn through energy. It may be that women with autism keep their social brain engaged, but mediate it through the prefrontal cortex—in a sense, intellectualizing social interactions that would be intuitive for other women.
“That suggests compensation,” Pelphrey says. It also jibes with women like Maya saying they have learned the rules of social interactions, but find it draining to act on them all day. “It’s exhausting because it’s like you’re doing math all day,” Pelphrey says.
Pelphrey is right that this finding isn’t entirely a surprise to clinicians. Some scientists who regularly see women with autism have picked up on their remarkable ability to learn the rules enough to camouflage their symptoms—the way Maya has learned to. (“I don’t like making eye contact,” Maya says. “I do it because I have to and I know it’s appropriate.”)
This means clinicians have to be more creative when diagnosing women on the spectrum, rather than simply looking for, say, repetitive behavior, as they might with men. “Without their self-report telling you how stressful it is to maintain appearances, you wouldn’t really know,” says Francesca Happé, the director of the MRC Centre at King’s College London. “They have good imitation, good intonation in their language, body language—surface behavior isn’t very useful for a diagnosis, at least for a certain set of women on the spectrum.”
