Latest Ilan Dinstein Stories

PITTSBURGH, Sept. 19, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- Autism is a disorder well known for its complex changes in behavior - including repeating actions over and over and having difficulty with social interactions and language. Current approaches to understanding what causes these atypical behaviors focus primarily on specific brain regions associated with these specific behaviors without necessarily linking back to fundamental properties of the brain's signaling abilities. (Logo:...

Researchers say autistic toddlers' brain activity appears to be out of sync at a very early stage. Scientists in Israel used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to look at the brains of sleeping toddlers and found that certain types of neural activity are disrupted in autistic children, but not in typical children."What we looked at is how the activity is synchronized," Ilan Dinstein of Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, who led the study, told Reuters."And we...

A new study provides valuable insight into the neuropathology of early autism development by imaging the brains of naturally sleeping toddlers. The research, published by Cell Press in the June 24 issue of the journal Neuron, identifies a brain abnormality observed at the very beginning stages of autism that may aid in early diagnosis of autism and shed light on its underlying biology.The human brain is split into two separate hemispheres, which are mostly symmetrical in terms of anatomy and...

UCSD researchers say finding could lead to earlier diagnoses and treatmentIn a novel imaging study of sleeping toddlers, scientists at the University of California, San Diego Autism Center of Excellence report that a diminished ability of a young brain's hemispheres to "sync" with one another could be a powerful, new biological marker of autism, one that might enable an autism diagnosis at a very young age.Writing in the June 23 issue of the journal Neuron, Eric Courchesne, PhD,...