The study is not the first to look at age-related brain changes in people with autism. “We tend to think that are a pretty static event that happens in utero, or in the first few years, and they’re obviously not,” says Joseph Piven, professor of psychiatry at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, who was not involved in the study. The changes occur both in the gray matter, which primarily consists of neurons’ cell bodies, and in the white matter tracts comprising the long, thin projections of neurons. The researchers saw similar growth patterns when they focused on 11 brain regions and structures, including the corpus callosum, thalamus, cerebellum and several parts of the cortex, all of which have been implicated in autism. “They are faced with new demands, and they have less brain resources to deal with that,” Lange says. That coincides with the transition into adulthood, which is particularly challenging for some people with the disorder. “People with autism miss the increase in brain volume in those younger years,” says lead investigator Nicholas Lange, associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard University’s McLean Hospital. After this period, controls continue to show gains in brain volume until their mid-20s, whereas the brains of people with autism begin shrinking. This difference fades between ages 10 and 15, as brain volume in controls increases. Total brain volume in boys with autism tends to be larger than that of controls before age 10. The study used magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to track brain volume in 100 males with autism and 56 controls, all ranging in age from 3 to 35 years, over an eight-year span. Several brain regions in people with autism become enlarged earlier than usual during childhood and shrink too soon during adulthood, finds a study published 7 November in Autism Research 1. Revealing scans: People with autism miss out on the steady increase in whole brain volume that typically occurs throughout childhood.