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cavernio
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29 Apr 2015, 10:38 pm

Anyone actually had any sort of brain scans where it's been like 'yup, this makes sense since they have an asd?'


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olympiadis
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30 Apr 2015, 12:06 pm

I've had a brain scan and was told that nothing really stood out as abnormal.



Aniihya
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30 Apr 2015, 12:11 pm

Have had a couple, doesn't really show asd.



alex
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30 Apr 2015, 1:16 pm

Brain scans don't show asperger's.


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PseudointellectualHorse
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01 May 2015, 1:36 am

FWIW, you can read about Temple Grandin's brain scan.

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Temple Grandin, perhaps the world’s most famous person with autism, has exceptional nonverbal intelligence and spatial memory, and her brain has a host of structural and functional differences compared with the brains of controls...



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01 May 2015, 2:02 am

I've had over a dozen brain scans in my life and wonder of I got AS from all that X-ray exposure, plus having a radioactive tracer injected in to your blood stream, just so the scanner can see all the blood vessels in my brain, didn't help either. What was the conclusion to all of this scanning. Nothing, nadda, zilch. My brain tested perfectly normal.



Janissy
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01 May 2015, 10:16 am

cavernio wrote:
Anyone actually had any sort of brain scans where it's been like 'yup, this makes sense since they have an asd?'


This would only be possible if the person was enrolled in a study. Brain scans are not used clinically (yet) for a positive autism diagnosis. Instead, they are used to rule out other conditions that could be causing similar problems. That is why people are saying that their brain scans showed nothing. Findings suggesting autism showing up on a brain scan are still purely in the research, not the clinical, phase.



voleregard
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01 May 2015, 11:43 am

I found a helpful article titled "Functional magnetic resonance imaging of autism spectrum disorders" at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3513685/

While the paper provides the caveat that "there is no unifying account of brain dysfunction that explains all the core symptoms of ASDs," the paper does provide several examples where research indicates that impairments related to ASD such as facial processing and theory of mind do show up in fMRI scans:

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A recent study of children with ASDs and their unaffected siblings found that activation in posterior superior temporal sulcus (as well as the amygdala and ventromedial prefrontal cortex) during biological motion perception differentiated children with ASDs both from their unaffected siblings and from matched control participants, suggesting that activation of this region may be related to phenotypic expression of social deficits in ASDs rather than genetic liability.



Some findings don't show up in all situations, but this meta-research indicates that cognitive impairments associated with ASD can be seen in specific areas.

In the area of cognitive control, there were consistent findings:

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Although the direction of effects has varied across studies (ie, frontostriatal hyperactivation vs hypoactivation), likely due to task demands and analysis methods, anomalous frontostriatal activation during tasks requiring cognitive control has been a consistent result in ASD samples, with the majority of findings indicating frontostriatal hyperactivation that has been interpreted to reflect a neurofunctional compensatory mechanisms to overcome cortical inefficiency.


Even scanning for structural anomalies do find differences in ASD patients:
Structural brain abnormalities in adolescents with autism spectrum disorder and patients with attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder wrote:
from: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18093031: the autism-specific grey matter abnormalities near the right temporo-parietal junction may be associated with impaired 'theory of mind' abilities. These findings shed some light on both similarities and differences in the neurocognitive profiles of ADHD and ASD patients.


Has anyone had an fMRI that showed no abnormalities?



LupaLuna
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01 May 2015, 12:57 pm

voleregard wrote:
I found a helpful article titled "Functional magnetic resonance imaging of autism spectrum disorders" at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3513685/



Has anyone had an fMRI that showed no abnormalities?


I've had MRI scans before. But I never an fMRI. That's new to me. All the scans I had, where all done over 20 years ago.



starkid
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01 May 2015, 9:48 pm

Janissy wrote:
cavernio wrote:
Anyone actually had any sort of brain scans where it's been like 'yup, this makes sense since they have an asd?'


This would only be possible if the person was enrolled in a study. Brain scans are not used clinically (yet) for a positive autism diagnosis. Instead, they are used to rule out other conditions that could be causing similar problems. That is why people are saying that their brain scans showed nothing. Findings suggesting autism showing up on a brain scan are still purely in the research, not the clinical, phase.

The OP does not seem to be talking about diagnosing or inferring ASD from brain scans. It wouldn't make any sense for the doctor or technician to say, "this makes sense since they have an asd" if the patient hadn't already been determined to have an ASD.