Predicting treatment effectiveness for adults with autism
"We found that when participants showed more brain activation in certain regions within the social brain network, while viewing digitally represented biological motion -- motion that symbolizes something a human might do, such as playing pat-a-cake -- the intervention was more beneficial to the participants," explained Dr. Daniel Yang, assistant research professor at the George Washington University and Children's National Health System. "Whereas if these social brain network regions did not show much activation, we observed that the person may not benefit from the intervention at this particular time but, as the brain is constantly changing, could benefit in the future, for example, by increasing pretreatment activation in these regions." The U.S. Interagency Autism Coordinating Committee (IACC) named Dr. Yang's finding utilizing this predictive method with pediatric populations in a separate study one of the top 20 advances in autism research of 2016...