UNC autism study expanded to follow 500+ infants

From MyNC.com:

University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill researchers have received an additional $3.25 million in funding for an Infant Brain Imaging Study (IBIS) to understand brain changes in children with autism.

The original IBIS study was awarded $10 million in 2007 by the National Institutes of Health to follow 544 infants, aged 6 and 12 months, whose older siblings are autistic. Infants would receive behavioral assessments and magnetic resonance (MRI) exams at regular intervals to monitor brain growth and onset of autistic behaviors.

The study builds on two key findings from researchers. The first is that the brains of children with autism are five to 10 percent larger at two years of age than children without autism. Overgrowth is believed to begin around the end of the child's first year of life. The second finding is that onset of social deficits associated with autism do not occur until the end of the first year.

"Once these brain and behavioral changes are identified, potential benefits might include the development of early screening measures for autism and a better understanding of the underlying brain mechanisms, which we hope will lead to treatments to prevent or reduce the problems that individuals with autism face," said Joseph Piven, M.D., the study's principal investigator and director of the Carolina Institute for Developmental Disabilities.

The NIH recently awarded the project supplemental funding of $500,000 per year for five years and the Simons Foundation Autism Research Initiative provided $150,000 a year for five years.

Piven said the additional funding will allow researchers to examine all 544 children at all time points, instead of focusing only on those that are most likely to develop utism.