04 Nov Autism risk gene may rewire brain, U.S. study finds

AuntMinnie.com | November 4 – Too many connections in the frontal lobe of the brain may help explain some of the learning problems experienced by people with autism, U.S. researchers said on Wednesday.

They said autistic children with a common autism risk gene appear to have a lot of brain connections clustered in the frontal lobe, a part of the brain important for learning.

But they had fewer connections to other parts of the brain, a finding that may help explain how this gene variant rewires the brain.

“This is a key piece of the puzzle we’ve been searching for,” said Dr. Daniel Geschwind of the University of California, Los Angeles, who worked on the study published in Science Translational Medicine.

“Now we can begin to unravel the mystery of how genes rearrange the brain’s circuitry not only in autism, but in many related neurological disorders.”

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