Cerebral scan

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Can we detect autism, AS, HFA ... with a cerebral scan ?

According to my shrink there are certain traits yes. Doesn't mean it is definitive. I have had MRI and CAT scans for something else. I'm waiting if I'm need more for a whole host o problems so I'll let you know. There are various types of scans see.

i dont think you can see autism in any kindof a brain scan, i may be wrong though

No not diagnostically. From my understanding there can be traits. Just like if they look at a savant's brain there are geometric traits.

i think this is still stuff that's under a lot of research. much of the brain is still a blackbox... but any kind of behavior/cognitive testing that you can couple with active brain scans... is good

I've only had static scan so far hope to have an active scan will see.

it's really hard to make logical sense out of a lot of these kinds of scans cause we don't really know which neurons necesarily communicate with which... for some parts of the brain that are thought to be critical for say, autism... like the hippocampus... (same for many other parts of the brain too... pretty much the best known synapse tract of the brain is for the visual system cause it's easy to stimulate and map)

with so many inknowns... the scans make for some pretty pictures and probably some good general information... you just can't really draw any concrete conclusions because of the unknowns.

and just because some parts of the brain are or are not responding doesn't doesn't tell us WHY that is the case.... which comes back to the need for more research in the field of neuroscience... so that we can understand the WHY part

It would be neat, if you could.

If I had to place a bet on which brain scan would be most likely to work I would go for PET using F-18 deoxyglucose, I suspect that if we took a large number of people with ASDs and a large control group then we could find some tasks where some difference in the brain image would exist.

The problems I see are

1. Even if we see a difference we might not understand what it means for decades

2. It brings up the point that some people might be outed against their will as aspies with greater ease, when a blood test or some other cheap test for autism exists then it is possible that some employers might be able to discriminate with greater ease.

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Diagnosed under the DSM5 rules with autism spectrum disorder, under DSM4 psychologist said would have been AS (299.80) but I suspect that I am somewhere between 299.80 and 299.00 (Autism) under DSM4.

There are at least two teams working towards a statistical identification of autism in brain scans:

Investigating the predictive value of whole-brain structural MR scans in autism: a pattern classification approach.
Ecker C, Rocha-Rego V, Johnston P, Mourao-Miranda J, Marquand A, Daly EM, Brammer MJ, Murphy C, Murphy DG
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19683584

Prediction of Individual Brain Maturity Using fMRI
Nico U. F. Dosenbach, Binyam Nardos, Alexander L. Cohen, Damien A. Fair, Jonathan D. Power, Jessica A. Church, Steven M. Nelson, Gagan S. Wig, Alecia C. Vogel, Christina N. Lessov-Schlaggar, Kelly Anne Barnes, Joseph W. Dubis, Eric Feczko, Rebecca S. Coalson, John R. Pruett, Jr., Deanna M. Barch, Steven E. Petersen, Bradley L. Schlaggar
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/a ... /5997/1358