Topic: autism spectrum disorder

Tatsuya Osaki examines vascular contributions to autism spectrum disorder, focusing on blood–brain barrier integrity and cerebral blood-flow dynamics during early development. Rett syndrome provides a starting point: MeCP2 mutations impair endothelial function, suggesting that vascular cells themselves contribute to disease mechanisms. A three-dimensional microphysiological model built from human induced pluripotent stem cells recreates blood–brain barrier structure and function. Patient-derived endothelial cells form perfusable microvascular networks but show impaired barrier function, a find

Electroencephalography (EEG) has been thoroughly studied for decades in psychiatry research. Yet its integration into clinical practice as a diagnostic/prognostic tool remains unachieved. We hypothesize that a key reason is the underlying patient's heterogeneity, overlooked in psychiatric EEG research relying on a case-control approach. We combine HD-EEG with normative modeling to quantify this heterogeneity using two well-established and extensively investigated EEG characteristics -spectral power and functional connectivity- across a cohort of 1674 patients with attention-deficit/hyperacti

Individuals afflicted with certain types of autism spectrum disorder often exhibit impaired cognitive function alongside enhanced emotional symptoms and mood lability. However, current understanding of the pathogenesis of autism and intellectual disabilities is based primarily on studies in the hippocampus and cortex, brain areas involved in cognitive function. But, these disorders are also associated with strong emotional symptoms, which are likely to involve changes in the amygdala and other brain areas. In this talk I will highlight these issues by presenting analyses in rat models of ASD/I

In the lecture Yvette Roke and Jamie Hoefakker will discuss the positive and negative effects of daily stress on mental health. They will also highlight which characteristics are likely to cause more stress related issues, and why recovery time is very important. They will give an understanding of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) in relation to daily stress and they will discuss the app, SAM the stress autism mate, developed and investigated (SCED design) in co-creation with their patients with ASD.

Our brains must generate and maintain stable activity patterns over decades of life, despite the dramatic changes in circuit connectivity and function induced by learning and experience-dependent plasticity. How do our brains acheive this balance between opposing need for plasticity and stability? Over the past two decades, we and others have uncovered a family of “homeostatic” negative feedback mechanisms that are theorized to stabilize overall brain activity while allowing specific connections to be reconfigured by experience. Here I discuss recent work in which we demonstrate that individua

Gestational exposure to environmental toxins, infections, and stressors are epidemiologically linked to neurodevelopmental disorders with strong male-bias, such as autism spectrum disorder. We modeled some of these prenatal risk factors in mice, by co-exposing pregnant dams to an environmental pollutant and limited-resource stress, which robustly dysregulated the maternal immune system. Male but not female offspring displayed long-lasting behavioral abnormalities and alterations in the activity of brain networks encoding social interactions, along with disruptions of gut structure and microbio

Understanding how the brain uses information is a fundamental goal of neuroscience. Several human disorders (ranging from autism spectrum disorder to PTSD to Alzheimer’s disease) may stem from disrupted information processing. Therefore, this basic knowledge is not only critical for understanding normal brain function, but also vital for the development of new treatment strategies for these disorders. Memory may be defined as the retention over time of internal representations gained through experience, and the capacity to reconstruct these representations at later times. Long-lasting physical

Core body temperature is regulated to a setpoint between 36.1 to 37.8°C, with an average fluctuation of 0.5°C during a 24-hour day. Despite mechanistic safeguards, major temperature deviations (1-3°C) from the setpoint occur in the body and in turn the brain. For unknown reasons, in most mammals (humans included), these increases in brain temperature are benign. However, macro-fluctuations in brain temperature in some cases result in deleterious outcomes such as seizures. In this talk, I will describe a mechanism for circuit-level adaptive regulation of cortical activity during macro-fluctuati

Neocortical networks must generate and maintain stable activity patterns despite perturbations induced by learning and experience- dependent plasticity. There is abundant theoretical and experimental evidence that network stability is achieved through homeostatic plasticity mechanisms that adjust synaptic and neuronal properties to stabilize some measure of average activity, and this process has been extensively studied in primary visual cortex (V1), where chronic visual deprivation induces an initial drop in activity and ensemble average firing rates (FRs), but over time activity is restored

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a neurodevelopmental disorder affecting up to 1% of the population. Over the past few years, large-scale genomic studies have identified hundreds of genetic loci associated with liability to ASD. It is now time to translate these genetic discoveries into functional studies that can help us understand convergences and divergences across risk genes, and build pre-clinical cell and animal models. In this seminar, I will discuss some of the most recent findings on the genetic risk architecture of ASD. I will then expand on our work on biomarkers discovery and neur