Autistic brains no different from 'typical' brains, new study finds

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Flouting numerous small-scale studies, team finds that autism can't be identified through brain structure.

By Ruth Schuster | Nov. 5, 2014 | 4:28 PM

People with autism have fundamentally the same brain anatomy as typically developed individuals. Previous claims that differences in brain anatomy could explain the condition in general are wrong, says Israeli scientists, based on the world's broadest brain-imaging study to date.

Therefore, anatomical measures of the brain alone are unlikely to help identify autism, spells out Dr. Ilan Dinstein of the departments of Psychology and Brain and Cognitive Sciences at the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, who led the study.
Doctors have long hoped - even expected - to find answers to the origin of autism in brain structure. Indeed, numerous scientific papers did find differences. But these papers were fatally flawed, Dinstein explains, not least because each studied a small sample of people, typically 20 or 30.

"If among 20 subjects one has an especially small brain, it will skew the data of that tiny study significantly," he explains. "Then a paper is published reporting on anatomical differences."

Huge differences in 'normal' brains

Dinstein's innovation was first of all, to tap a worldwide collection of MRI scans from over 1,000 individuals (half with autism and half controls) ages six to 35 years old: 500 "normals" as control and 500 autism sufferers. His team also checked multiple areas of the brain (not only volume or, say, amygdala); and - for the first time - to methodically examine the hetereogeneity within each group, compared with the heterogeneity between the two groups.

http://www.haaretz.com/life/science-medicine/1.624782

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