“It’s a really robust marker of healthy brain development,” Jeste says.Īt 12 months of age, infants with TSC and controls have comparable peak oscillation speeds, the team found.
The researchers focused on alpha waves - low-frequency electrical signals produced by the resting brain.Īlpha oscillations typically get faster as children get older. Jeste and her colleagues used EEG to measure the brain activity of 35 children with TSC and 20 typical children at ages 12 and 24 months as the children sat in their caregivers’ laps watching a research assistant blow bubbles. “This is addressing a primary need within the field as a whole.” Slow waves: “Having something that we can objectively measure for individuals at risk has really been lacking ,” says Darcy Krueger, director of the Tuberous Sclerosis Clinic at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center in Ohio, who was not involved in the study.
Researchers have been looking for objective measures of some of these early signs of autism. They also show a decline in nonverbal intelligence between the ages of 1 and 3 years. Unlike children with TSC alone, those with both TSC and autism show social-communication difficulties in their first year of life 2. Predicting which babies will be diagnosed with autism is important for getting therapy to those most likely to need it. Most children with TSC also have epilepsy, and roughly half have autism. TSC is often diagnosed before birth or in early infancy. “We were able to identify, in the first two years of life, very robust EEG markers of both cognitive impairment and autism in TSC,” says lead researcher Shafali Jeste, associate professor of psychiatry, pediatrics and neurology at the University of California, Los Angeles. The oscillation speed of certain brain waves, as recorded by electroencephalography (EEG), also tracks with cognitive ability in children who have TSC, regardless of autism status. The study offers a potential marker for autism well before traditional diagnostic tests would pick up the condition. Toddlers who have both TSC and autism have brain waves that are unusually out of sync across hemispheres, a new study suggests 1. Activity monitor: A particular brain-wave pattern may augur autism in a toddler with tuberous sclerosis.Ĭertain patterns of electrical activity in the brain may signal autism in children with tuberous sclerosis complex (TSC), a related genetic condition.
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