Koegel Researchers Claim to have successfully treat Autism in infants

Most infants respond to a game of peek-a-boo with smiles at the very least, and, for those who find the activity particularly entertaining, gales of laughter.

For infants with autism spectrum disorders (ASD), however, the game can be distressing rather than pleasant, and they'll do their best to tune out all aspects of it—and that includes the people playing with them.

That disengagement is a hallmark of ASD, and one of the characteristics that amplifies the disorder as infants develop into children and then adults.

A study conducted by researchers at the Koegel Autism Center at UC Santa Barbara has found that replacing such games in favour of those the infant prefers can actually lessen the severity of the infants' ASD symptoms, and, perhaps, alleviate the condition altogether.

Their work is highlighted the current issue of the Journal of Positive Behavioral Interventions. Lynn Koegel, clinical director of the center and the study's lead author, described the game-playing protocol as a modified Pivotal Response Treatment (PVT).

Developed at UCSB, PRT is based on principles of positive motivation. The researchers identified the activities that seemed to be more enjoyable to the infants and taught the respective parents to focus on those rather than on the typical games they might otherwise choose.

"We had them play with their infants for short periods, and then give them some kind of social reward," Koegel said.

"Over time, we conditioned the infants to enjoy all the activities that were presented by pairing the less desired activities with the highly desired ones."

The social reward is preferable to, say, a toy, Koegel noted, because it maintains the ever-crucial personal interaction.

"The idea is to get them more interested in people," she continued, "to focus on their socialisation. If they're avoiding people and avoiding interacting, that creates a whole host of other issues.

They don't form friendships, and then they don't get the social feedback that comes from interacting with friends."

According to Koegel, by the end of the relatively short one- to three-month intervention period, which included teaching the parents how to implement the procedures, all the infants in the study had normal reactions to stimuli.

"Two of the three have no disabilities at all, and the third is very social," she said. "The third does have a language delay, but that's more manageable than some of the other issues."

On a large scale, Koegel hopes to establish some benchmark for identifying social deficits in infants so parents and health care providers can intervene sooner rather than later.

"We have a grant from the Autism Science Foundation to look at lots of babies and try to really figure out which signs are red flags, and which aren't," she said.

"A number of the infants who show signs of autism will turn out to be perfectly fine; but we're saying, let's not take the risk if we can put an intervention in play that really works. Then we don't have to worry about whether or not these kids would develop the full-blown symptoms of autism."

Historically, ASD is diagnosed in children 18 months or older, and treatment generally begins around 4 years. "You can pretty reliably diagnose kids at 18 months, especially the more severe cases," said Koegel.

"The mild cases might be a little harder, especially if the child has some verbal communication. There are a few measures –– like the ones we used in our study –– that can diagnose kids pre-language, even as young as six months.

But ours was the first that worked with children under 12 months and found an effective intervention." Given the increasing number of children being diagnosed with ASD, Koegel's findings could be life altering.

"When you consider that the recommended intervention for preschoolers with autism is 30 to 40 hours per week of one-on-one therapy, this is a fairly easy fix," she said.

"We did a single one-hour session per week for four to 12 weeks until the symptoms improved, and some of these infants were only a few months old. We saw a lot of positive change."

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Brain Structure of Infants predicts Language Skills at one year

Using a brain-imaging technique that examines the entire infant brain, researchers have found that the anatomy of certain brain areas – the hippocampus and cerebellum – can predict children's language abilities at 1 year of age. 

The University of Washington study is the first to associate these brain structures with future language skills. 

The results are published in the January issue of the journal Brain and Language.

"The brain of the baby holds an infinite number of secrets just waiting to be uncovered, and these discoveries will show us why infants learn languages like sponges, far surpassing our skills as adults," said co-author Patricia Kuhl, co-director of the UW's Institute for Learning & Brain Sciences.

Children's language skills soar after they reach their first birthdays, but little is known about how infants' early brain development seeds that path.

Identifying which brain areas are related to early language learning could provide a first glimpse of development going awry, allowing for treatments to begin earlier.

"Infancy may be the most important phase of postnatal brain development in humans," said Dilara Deniz Can, lead author and a UW postdoctoral researcher.

"Our results showing brain structures linked to later language ability in typically developing infants is a first step toward examining links to brain and behavior in young children with linguistic, psychological and social delays."

In the study, the researchers used magnetic resonance imaging to measure the brain structure of a mix of 19 boys and girls at 7 months of age.

The researchers used a measurement called voxel-based morphometry to determine the concentration of gray matter, consisting of nerve cells, and of white matter, which make up the network of connections throughout the brain.

The study is the first to relate the outcomes of this whole-brain imaging technique to predict future ability in infants.

The whole-brain approach freed the researchers from having to select a few brain regions for study ahead of time, ones scientists might have expected to be involved based on adult data.

Read the full article at: Medical Express

Newly approved drug Surfaxin® for infant Respiratory Distress Syndrome (RDS)

Scientific advances at The Scripps Research Institute have led to a new drug Surfaxin® (lucinactant), approved March 7 by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to treat infant respiratory distress syndrome.

The FDA statement announcing the approval. 

"I am excited that our scientific findings will help save lives," said Charles Cochrane, MD, professor emeritus at Scripps Research.

"Many years of work in our basic research laboratory at The Scripps Research Institute made this landmark development possible."

The Study
In the study, the infants were treated with lucinactant (Surfaxin), colfosceril palmitate (Exosurf), or beractant (Survanta) within 30 minutes of birth. Those treated with lucinactant had significant improvement in respiratory distress syndrome at 24 hours after birth

RDS
Respiratory distress syndrome (also known as neonatal respiratory distress syndrome) is a life-threatening condition affecting pre-term infants.

The more premature an infant is, the more likely he or she is to suffer from it and die.

The condition occurs when infants are born prior to the time when natural surfactant is made in their lungs.

Surfactant is a liquid that coats the inside of the lungs, helping to keep the air sacs open and making normal breathing possible. Without enough surfactant, the lungs collapse and the body can be starved of oxygen.

In addition to mechanical ventilation, current treatments for pre-term infants involve using surfactants derived from chopped cow or pig lungs.

Current Disadvantages
However, animal-derived surfactants are expensive, contain material that can be injurious to the lungs, and cannot be produced in quantities sufficient to treat pre-term infants worldwide.

In addition, animal-derived surfactants can only be used once since they cause an immune reaction; in contrast, the new synthetic surfactant is not immunogenic.

The Cochrane lab first created a synthetic version of surfactant in the 1990s, mimicking a natural peptide known as Surfactant Protein B; the inventors of the technology are Cochrane and Susan Revak.

After this formative work at Scripps Research, the therapy was developed by Discovery Labs of Warrington, PA, which oversaw the three phases of clinical trials required by the FDA.

These clinic trials provided data on the drug's success.

Children's Health Magazine and The New American Diet

Children's Health Magazine : Babies : The New American Diet

Exposure to pesticides and other toxins in pregnancy and early childhood can set your baby up for obesity later in life. Here's your stay-safe plan.

Of all the scary things to worry about when you're pregnant, there's one that's probably not on your radar, even though it affects almost every baby born: exposure to endocrine-disrupting chemicals (EDCs).

When we began researching the forthcoming book The New American Diet (Rodale, 2009), we knew that traditional diet advice just wasn't working anymore. Simple principles--eat less fat, choose chicken or fish over beef, eat plenty of vegetables--were based on science from the middle of last century, and the world has changed since then.

From the hidden calories in many processed products to the way our meat and produce are being raised, today's food is very different from what we ate 50 years ago, and traditional diet advice simply doesn't take those factors into consideration.

But the deeper we dug, the more we realized that America's obesity epidemic had a sneaky underlying cause few of us consider in making our nutritional choices: Simply put, we're eating and drinking too many EDCs.

They enter our food chain through pesticides on produce, and through plastics that leach into our food and water. In a recent statement by the Endocrine Society, the largest organization of experts devoted to research on hormones and the clinical practice of endocrinology, researchers noted that the rise in the incidence of obesity matches the rise in the use and distribution of EDCs, and concluded that they may be linked to the obesity epidemic.