I read today that researchers at Carnegie Mellon University have devised a test for autism that they say is 97% accurate. It involves giving someone am MRI scan and asking them to think about the meanings of words they are given, such as 'hug' or 'cuddle'. The posterior cingulate area of an autistic person's brain is supposed to show significantly less activity than that of an NT person when thinking about such words.
What do autistic people think of this? Is a test a good thing?
They weren't looking to establish differences, or similarities, between females with autism and males with autism. Their paper is silent on that issue. They were only trying to demonstrate the relationship between autism and fmri images. A study on gender differences would be kept for a separate paper at a later date. A paper will usually only look at a single factor and they will carefully separate gender issues into another paper so as not to confuse the primary focus of this paper.
Thanks for the clarification. This would seem to be another example of research being done on men and the presumption made by the researchers that the results are valid for women. Of the 34 people in the test only two were female. No one would dream of conducting research where 32 out of 34 participants were female and saying the results were valid for men.
But I too am very interested in how both our brains and bodies are different from those of NTs.
I misunderstood Longman's comment, I thought he was mainly talking about the UK study.
Anyways, a comment from Oliver Robinson of UCL at the end of the NS article says:
"Where approaches such as this hold promise is in clarifying the underlying mechanistic problems in the disorders, which we may eventually use to develop better treatments, and to get those treatments to the right people," Robinson says. However, the clinical use of such techniques is still quite a way off"
i.e. this is about basic research rather than subjecting children or adults to tests.
The PLOS one article makes interesting reading. It explains where their 97% figure comes from. They identified 16 out of 17 people with autism diagnoses correctly and they identified the 17 controls correctly so they count that as 33/34 success rate. I'm intrigued by how our minds are wired and/or programmed differently to non-autistic people and how this can show up on an MRI scan. Personally I don't have any problem with this research.
(Their sample had 15 Male, 2 Female in the autistic group and 17 Male in the control group. Average age was 25, the average IQ of the autistic group closely matched the IQ of the control group.)
I'm wondering how on earth you would get an autistic child into a noisy claustrophobic MRI scanner for the 40 minutes or so it takes to do a brain scan. Plenty of NT adults cannot stand it.
The link is here though I read the print version:
www.newscientist.com/.../dn26651-hug-brain-test-could-diagnose-disorders-like-autism.html
I have complained to the magazine about their use of the word 'disorder', be great if others could too. So far I have a 100% success rate in getting websites to use less offensive language when talking about autism. Even the BBC agreed.
The study looked at 34 people altogether. It doesn't say how many were men and how many were women.
I think the test would only be suitable for use on adults as children's brain's are not fully developed and don't process information in the same way.
A yes/no test is appealing to scientists but would it help us? Lots of autistic people are misdiagnosed with mental health conditions but as they haven't been able to get a diagnostic interview for autism would they be able to get an MRI scan for it? When i got diagnosed I ws a shoo-in, no doubt in the clinicians mind at all. A scan wouldn't have helped me though perhaps i wouldn't have had to wait a year for it a I did the diagnosis.
But then again do i want a machine telling me I'm autistic? The diagnostic interview was one of the milestones of my life, I'd never before been able to talk about the way I am and how I experience the world.
Hi Electra,
Do you have a link that you could post to the item you read about the Carnegie Mellon research?
Longman, do you have a reference for your 97% figure? I read this to say that almost all research funding went on research! I suspect that a lot of money gets spent on all of the benefits and provisions that are allocated for helping people with autism - is there a figure that you have for that expenditure? The lost opportunities of so many people who are under employed or unemployed creates a massive cost for our society. The people whose lives are more miserable and disabled by the condition is a great opportunity for making things better. Anything that can help find new ways to improve that situation is to be welcomed.
Personally, I feel that there is still a lot to learn about autism and other conditions of the mind. There are far too many people inappropriately diagnosed with bipolar disorder, borderline personality disorder etc and anything that would help reliably identify autism in some of these difficult cases would be useful. Mental health is too much of a lottery for my liking.
I suspect it would take forever to get an mri scan, even if it did work. These things are hugely expensive. Perhaps parents might also be concerned about the effects of scanning a child's brain.
We've been here before, with UK researchers showing relaxing scenes and asking questions of people while being scanned.
It was published in PLOS-1 an on-line blog journal, that carries papers on all kinds of subject from geology to bird migration, but not noted for autism studies.The test group was 17 adults, so the 97% claim is a bit tautological, the nearest whole adult being 6% not 3% as implied in the 97 (for 16.5 adults it worked).
The subjects had to think about 16 social interactions and they measured brain patterns. How the subjects interpreted the words affected brain reactions which could be measured on the MRI - hardly direct. They are planning to use the research to analyse "other psychiatric disorders" (which should make us pause - is autism a psychiatric disorder?). Carnegie Mellon at Pittsburg does have a reputation for this kind of work, but it is a research centre justifying its income by playing games. I wish stuff like this was published with more scientific circumspection. It is primarily aimed at attracting more investment in Carnegie Mellon.
As has lately been pointed out 97% of research funds is being spent on this sort of research, less than 3% of available funds on helping people live with autism.
There should be some ethics applied to this stuff. To me it looks exceedingly unethical.
