Speakers include:

Edward H. Cook, Jr. M.D.
Dr. Tom Owley, M.D
"A Controlled Trial of Secretin in Autism"

Dr. Andrew Wakefield, M.D.
"The Gut-Brain Axis in Childhood Developmental Disorders"

Dr. Audrius Plioplys. M.D.
"Clinical Review and Autoimmune Hypothesis"

Dr. Mary Coleman, M.D.
"Overview of Autism"

Matthew Belmonte
"Attention and Specialisation of Function in the Autistic Brain"

Dr. Diane Chugani, Ph.D.
"Imaging Neurotransmitter Function with PET in Autistic Children"

$75 per person, $65 for CAN members, includes box lunch

For further Information call
the ILLINOIS CAN OFFICE at (630) 462-3250

• outline
• autistic child
• autistic behaviour as epiphenomenon
• many brain regions have been implicated
• neurological exam suggests cerebellar and parietal abnormalities
• deficit of Purkinje cells
• affected folium
• vermis measurement example
• vermis measurements
• auditory-visual shift experiment
• How do primary effects differ from developmental consequences?
• auditory-visual shift behaviour
• abnormal brain electrical response following shifts
• attention-related regions of the cerebellum
• deficit of parietal tissue in 43% of people with autism
• narrow posterior corpus callosum
• corpus callosum is normally myelinated, so fibres must be absent
• myelination of corpus callosum proceeds normally
• the Posner experiment examines spatial shifts of attention
• people with autism are impaired at rapid shifts
• impairment correlates with parietal tissue deficit
• brain electrical responses suggest attention is abnormally concentrated in autism with parietal damage, uniformly distributed in autism without parietal damage
• stimuli (flashed at 18 frames per second):
  • left background
  • right background
  • attended left target
  • right background
  • ignored left target
  • right background
  • left background
  • attended right target
• electrode placements
• normal undergraduate volunteers :-)
• behavioural results
• signal processing
• in the normal brain, stimulus-driven signal increases and background signal decreases in the hemisphere contralateral to the attended visual field - this effect is opposite in each hemisphere
• the autistic brain responds with a generalised arousal, in both hemispheres, always greater in the case of rightward shifts
• at long inter-target intervals, normal modulation of background activity is absent in autism
• fMRI results show that superior parietal lobe is active during shifts, and occipitotemporal cortex is modulated between widely spaced shifts
• hypothesis: in autism, sensory hyper-arousal partially compensates for lack of attentional control
• fMRI result on Embedded Figures Task is consistent with this view, but fails to distinguish activities due to shifts and activities modulated by shifts
• regions of interest, for shift-related and shift-modulated activities, shown on a posterior coronal slice
• acknowledgements