SciShow Script by Rachel Hamilton
Autism and Extra Synapses!
Autism Spectrum Disorder is a neurodevelopmental disorder that affects around one in every 100 people.
Sadly, very little is known about the disorder or why it occurs.
Some scientist link it to trauma in early development, even as early as in the womb. Others think environmental factors and even genetics play a massive part in the onset of the disorder.
What we do know, is that it is a lifelong disorder that is more common in boys than girls.
People with the disorder have difficulties interacting socially, and sometimes have impaired or unusual ways of communicating in general. Some cannot communicate verbally at all.
This general lack of social ability often diagnosed in early childhood when children are learning how to interact with others and also learning basic life skills.
Thankfully there is a lot of research going into not only finding out why this disorder occurs, but also into possibly finding a cure.
A group of researchers led by David Sulzer at Columbia University Medical Center examined the brains of children with autism and what they found, was pretty interesting.
All of them, had extra Synapses.
Synapses are the meeting point of two nerve cells, they basically transmit the electrical information your brain sends out, to other areas of the brain.
Sulzer and his team discovered that in over two dozen brains of people with Autism none of them had the usual “pruning” that non-autistic brains undergo in early childhood, to get rid of broken or damaged synapses. This process is called Autophagy.
Basically their brains were like a rose bush that had never been trimmed back! Meaning all these brains were a hot mess of functioning and nonfunctioning synapses!
Why this lack of Autophagy or maintenance occurred, is due to an overactive protein in autistic brains called mTOR. Researchers are still stumped over why the over activity occurs, but the damage it does is pretty serious.
If you have to many Synapses, signals that your brain sends out can be misread, changed completely or might never even reach where it was meant to go.
Its like having a GPS that always takes you down dead end roads!
Hundreds of genes have be linked to Autism, so it is still unclear if this failed spring cleaning, is more a cause, or a symptom.
However Sulzer and his team are now looking into a drug that might help regulate the protein, and thus a normal Autophagy should occur.
The drug is still years away from human testing but Sulzer and his team are hopeful that this discovery could pave the way to helping thousands of Autistic brains around the world.
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References:
http://www.iflscience.com/brain/children-autism-have-extra-synapses-their-brains
https://www.autismspectrum.org.au/content/about-autism-spectrum-disorders
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autism_spectrum
http://www.psychology.org.au/publications/tip_sheets/autism/
http://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2014/p0327-autism-spectrum-disorder.html
http://www.cell.com/neuron/fulltext/S0896-6273(14)00651-5
Description:
*HOST* goes through the amazing discovery made by David Sulzer and his team about Autistic brains and extra Synapses!
