Chicago, December 1, 2008 - Unique brain wave patterns, spotted for the first time in autistic children, may help explain why they have so much trouble communicating. Using an imaging helmet that resembles a big salon hair dryer, researchers discovered what they believe are "signatures of autism" that show a delay in processing individual sounds. That delay is only a fraction of a second, but when it's for every sound, the lag time can cascade into a major obstacle in speaking and understanding people, the researchers said.

    Imagine if it took a tine bit longer than normal to understand each syllable. by the end of a sentence, you'd be pretty confused. The study authors believe that's what happens with autistic children, based on the brain-wave patterns detected in school-age children in their study. The prelimiary results need to be confirmed, but the researchers hope this technique could be used to help diagnose autism in children as young as age 1. That's at least a year earlier that usual, and it could mean treatment much sooner.

    Andrew Papanicolaou, a director at the University of Texas' Houston campus, said the study makes a major contribution. "It gives us a window through which we get a picture of the neurological conditions responsible for the peculiar behaviors in autism," said Papanicolaou, who was not involved in the research.

    Dr. James McPartland, a Yale University autism researcher not involved in the study, called the results "preliminary, with promise." Whether the patterns found in the study exist in all autistic children is uncertain, but they're worthy of more study, he said. Study results were prepared for release today at the Radiological Society of North America meeting in Chicago.

    Finding biomarkers - like the brain waves - that could enable earlier diagnosis and treatment is the goal, McPartland said. Now, doctors typically diagnose autism through parents' reports and by observing behaviors that often don't emerge until at least age 2.

    Researchers ar Children's Hospital of Philadelphia had 64 autistic children, ages 6 to 15, listen through headphones to a series of rapid beeps while under a helmet-like devise, which recorded the brain's response to the sound. Those brain waves were compared with responses in a group of non-autistic children. In the autistic children, the response time to each sound was delayed by one-fiftieth of a second. "We tend to speak at four syllables per second," said Timothy Roberts, the stugy's lead author. If an autistic brain "is slow in processing a change in a syllable, it could easily get to the point of being overloaded."