
Researchers funded by the National Institutes of Health's (NIH) National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) and National Institute on Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) have discovered that the brain's fear hub likely becomes abnormally small in the most severely socially-impaired males with autism spectrum disorder. New findings suggest that social fear in autism may initially trigger a hyperactive, abnormally enlarged amygdala, which eventually gives way to a toxic adaptation that kills amygdala cells and shrinks the structure, said Richard Davidson, Ph.D., and colleagues at the University of Wisconsin.