Maria Kechaidis serves as clinical director of OMNI Behavioral Health Solutions, a company she co-founded in 2008. In her leadership role, Maria Kechaidis provides assessments and in-home services for children with autism and other intellectual and developmental challenges.
According to two studies recently released in the journal Cerebral Cortex, children with autism tend to have different folding patterns in their brains than their neurotypical peers. One set of data comes out of San Diego State University, where psychology professor Ralph-Axel Muller and his team conducted brain scans on 64 neurotypical children and 64 children with autism, all between the ages of 6 and 18.
The researchers found that children with autism had above-average folding in parts of the brain regions that process sound and spatial information, as well as in areas that control motor skills and decision making. The brain's visual center showed fewer folds in the same children. Another set of scans confirmed these findings, which suggest either early disruptions in brain development or a secondary effect of brain overgrowth at young ages.
Another study, conducted at the University of California, Davis, performed similar scans on 154 3-year-old children, 105 of whom were boys who had autism and 49 of whom were control subjects. This study found that children with autism whose brains were enlarged had excessive folding in particular areas of the cortex. The researchers believe that this suggests a subtype of autism that involves particular brain function differences, but more research is being conducted to further understand the findings.
