| An Embryological Approach to Autism: The Thalidomide Connection
  
By Patricia M. Rodier, Ph.D. Edited by Catherine Johnson, Ph.D.
I became interested in studying autism after a parent asked me to think about the disorder. He had just heard me talk about injuries to the embryo's developing nervous system during early pregnancy, and he thought an embryologist might have new insights into the causes of autism.
Even though I had never studied autism, I was intrigued. So I went to the library and dug in. I read about 200 papers before concluding that there was simply not enough information to suggest how an embryologist like me might approach the problem. The causes of autism appeared to be multiple, the time of causation was not established, "morphologic" studies were few and often negative (meaning that the researcher had found nothing different about the basic shape or size of the various parts of the brain in autism), and the genetic studies, while interesting, were difficult to interpret as far as early development during pregnancy goes, which is what I study.
The behavioral studies were fascinating, but autistic behaviors are not ones we can easily relate to particular brain regions or systems. We have no idea what part of the brain might produce echolalia, or resistance to change, or just about any of the other behaviors parents see in their children. Knowing what part or parts of the brain are affected is essential to an embryologist. If this parent had asked me to study a syndrome that caused blindness, for instance, I would have had a place to start, since we know exactly what parts of the brain are necessary for vision--and I could have looked immediately at the periods when these parts of the brain are forming in the womb. But the research on autism told me very little about where in the brain the extremely varied problems in autism were being caused. So I wrote to the parent, saying I was discouraged. Given the state of know-ledge at the present, I didn't see any way an embryologist could study autism until a great deal more was known.
But shortly after that, purely by happenstance, I stumbled across some new results that changed my mind completely about the possibility of studying the causes of autism, and I have been hard at it ever since. The editors of NAARATIVE have asked me to describe the findings that gave me the clue I needed--as well as some of the studies we have completed or initiated over the past three years since then.
Continue to page 2 . . .
1 NAARATIVE, Number 1, Summer 1997 Newsletter of the National Alliance for Autism Research 1-888-777-NAAR
| |