r/science • u/mvea Professor | Medicine • Jan 30 '25

Neuroscience A low-cost tool accurately distinguishes neurotypical children from children with autism just by watching them copy the dance moves of an on-screen avatar for a minute. It can even tell autism from ADHD, conditions that commonly overlap.

https://newatlas.com/adhd-autism/autism-motion-detection-diagnosis/
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u/ZoeBlade Jan 31 '25

Yeah, I sensed we might have a bit of overlap in interests there! Huh, I didn't know about Childhood Disintegrative Disorder, that's interesting. I heard it used to be thought waaay back that autism was childhood schizophrenia. I'm hazy on how much they correlate, but I can see there's this whole overactive-brain cluster including those, OCD, etc.

I get really hazy on the science side of autism, though. I did start to do a reasonably deep dive on how the thalamus sends sensory input to the prefrontal cortex, which can tell the globus pallidus to make the thalamic reticular nucleus inhibit bits of the thalamus as required, which sounds like it doesn't work so well with many autists... The superior temporal sulcus sounded possibly like something that could cause face blindness and issues encoding and decoding pragmatics when it can't do its job properly... But I'm not at all confident in that, I think I inevitably got distracted into deep diving another topic before I got very far.

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u/book_of_black_dreams Jan 31 '25

I think one of the issues with autism research is that it’s so heterogeneous that all of the “noise” kind of obscures findings. For example, they did this study a few years ago where they loaded a bunch of brain scans from a large number of people with different disorders into an algorithm that would form clusters based on brain structure and patterns of connectivity. The autism brains didn’t cluster together - some autistic people were even grouped with typically developing kids who didn’t have any disorder at all.

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u/book_of_black_dreams Jan 31 '25

This is really interesting, but scientists know that the repetitive behaviors found in OCD affect a different part of the brain because medication that works for OCD doesn’t have any effect on the repetitive/obsessive behaviors of autism!