Brain Habit

There is common recognition in the field of developmental psychiatry on the necessity for new approaches to research into the mechanisms underlying neurodevelopmental disorders. In particular, prospective studies of infants at elevated likelihood for these disorders hold the potential to transform our understanding of the mechanisms underlying symptom emergence. However, traditional analytic approaches examine differences between groups of infants defined retrospectively by current diagnostic categories, implicitly reinforcing existing clinical models. Among other neurodevelopmental disorders, Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is characterised by high variability across individuals. This heterogeneity makes it difficult to capture the complexity of the disorder when investigating it under a unitary diagnostic label. In the symposium entitled "New tools for understanding transdiagnostic domains in developmental research"  presented at vICIS 2020 last July ( https://infantstudies....

Talking about autism, people usually think about difficulties in social communication and restricted and repetitive patterns of behaviours, interests or activities. What is less commonly known is that people in the autism spectrum often experience sensory sensitivity symptoms, to the point that the new edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) has incorporated ‘hyper- or hypo-reactivity to sensory input or unusual interests in sensory aspects of the environment’ as possible symptoms. These sensory characteristics begin to emerge in infancy and can be noticed when parents say things like "My child startles easily at sound" or "My child is distressed having nails trimmed". This does not mean that every child startling easily at sounds is going to be autistic. Like any trait, sensory sensitivity is distributed as a continuum across the general population, and researchers don’t consider sensory alterations among possible causes for aut...

Fetal programming is the process by which early environment interacts with genes to produce an individual human constitution. It is not only of great interest to developmental scientists but also has high media resonance due to the more and more commonly acknowledged notion that pregnancy actually affects vulnerability to disease later in life. First evidence came from an epidemiological study showing that birth characteristics, like low weight and lower gestational age, were linked to later diseases like diabetes, hypertension, but also psychopathology. What is currently accepted, though, is that these individual characteristics at birth are not the actual risk factors for later disease but rather is the environment to which the mother and the fetus are exposed during pregnancy that affects fetal development itself and in turn development later in life. There comes the focus of this post on actual prenatal conditions that may increase the risk for disease later in life, with a...

Social communication and interaction are essential to the human condition; some individuals present, however, with profound alterations in these capacities. The most striking example thereof is Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), considered to be among the most severe neurodevelopmental disorders in terms of prevalence, morbidity and impact on society. The first description of autism can be traced to 1943, when Leo Kanner (Kanner, 1968) and Hans Asperger used described behaviours that they separately observed in children, like social withdrawal, desire for sameness, communication/language impairment, stereotyped motor behaviours, and intellectual disability with onset from the first year of life, but also the expression of exceptional isolated talents and conserved linguistic abilities. Early infantile autism has been included in the diagnostic manual DSM-III in 1980, to be later covered by PDD (pervasive developmental disorder) in the DSM-IV (1994), changed into the current u...

This post is a bit off-topic for the purposes of this blog, but it’s a very sensitive topic to me and I’m sure someone might relate. Last Thursday, October 10 th , was World Mental Health Day, which made me think about my own mental health – something I do rarely. I’ve been feeling like a juggler lately, trying to do the trick with too many balls spinning around. Well, the trick here is my mental health, and the balls are my job as post-doc, my role as mother, as wife, as housekeeper, as pet owner. Thus, today I’m going to let it all go and write about difficulties experienced by a female scientist, an expat, a mother and so on and so forth. Being a scientist is not easy, and it’s not surprising that mental illness is so widespread in the sciences. Rates of depression and anxiety reported by postgraduate students are extremely high, with more than one-third of graduate students reporting being depressed, and I can relate. There have been tough times in the past 4 years, ...