A new study from researchers at IU and Rutgers University reports the development of a quantitative way to assess the variations in movement and link these variations to a diagnosis, according to an IU news release.
These movements are often otherwise ignored.
“This is the first time we have been able to explicitly characterize subtypes of severity in autism spectrum disorder,” said Jorge José, vice president of research at IU and the James H. Rudy Professor of Physics in the College of Arts and Sciences, in the release. “We also have determined that a pattern exists in the movement variations in some cases between children with autism and their parents, leading us to surmise that genetics plays a role in movement patterns.”
The report was presented at the 2014 Society for Neuroscience’s annual meeting in November, according to the University.
The research was conducted by José and Elizabeth Torres, an assistant professor of psychology at Rutgers University.
Torres and José also worked with Di Wu, a graduate student in José‘s lab, according to the University. The study was funded by the National Science Foundation.
To collect their data, researchers connected high-sensitivity movement detectors to participants to record micro-variations in their movements as they extended their arms to touch different points on a screen.
They recorded 240 movements per second of 30 people with autism, eight healthy adults and 21 parents of children with autism.
Participants touched a spot moving continuously on a screen approximately 100 consecutive times, according to the University.
“These variations in the hand’s movement speed produced a pattern that clustered in specific regions of a graph that produced metrics we could use — not only in children with autism but in their parents,” Torres said in the release.
Torres said autism leads to difficulty in detecting one’s own body ?movements.
Earlier research showed that people with autism tend to have more randomized patterns in the speed of their movements.
Wu presented this finding and the rest of the report to an audience of more than 32,000 scientists, according to the ?University.
“In healthy adults, the minute fluctuations in the speed of their movements, which we call peripheral spikes or p-spikes, normally occur at the onset or at the end of the arm extension exercise,” Wu said in the release. “They show very few p-spikes during the actual action, as the hand speeds up or slows down en route to the target. However, healthy children in the 3 to 5 year old range have random patterns of p-spikes, as do adults and children with autism spectrum disorder.”
The researchers also found that some of the parents of children with autism had random fluctuations in their speed.
These paterns of fluctuation can be useful in determining the severity of the autism, according to the University.
“Normally, children get more coordinated as they age, but we found that the young children with autism and the adults with autism all produced random p-spikes showing that they do not transition as they develop,” José said in the release. “We also found a correlation between the randomness of the p-spikes and the severity of the autism disorder. Among those with autism, the more random their p-spikes, the lower spoken language ability they had overall.”
Anna Hyzy
