Postmortem Study Hints at Two Types of Autism

Autistic brains show high levels of inflammation compared with controls, suggests a study of postmortem brain tissue from 11 individuals with autism, presented at a poster session Monday at the Society for Neuroscience meeting in Chicago.The researchers studied the gene expression profiles of five brains and found two distinct types: one that preferentially expresses genes controlling immune regulation, and another expressing those related to changes at synapses, the junctions between neurons.Intriguingly, few genes are over-expressed in both types of brains as compared with healthy controls, which may speak to the heterogeneity of the disorder, says lead investigator John Allman, professor of biology at the California Institute of Technology. "There may be several routes to autism."Read more at...SFARI, October 2009.