Be alert if your child reacts slowly to sound

When your child responds slowly to sounds, it may be a sign of autism. Experts have recently found that the brain of autistic children responds a little slower than normal children.

A teacher is teaching children with autism.Photo: viettribune.com.

This also explains why autistic children have difficulty communicating, US researchers have announced.

Timothy Roberts, deputy head of the research team at the Radiology Department at Children's Hospital in Philadelphia and colleagues, studied more than 30 autistic children aged 6 to 15 years.

They let them listen to a series of sounds and syllables while tracking small magnetic fields generated by electrical impulses in the brain as they wear a helmet-like device.

When compared to the response time in the brain of normal children, autistic children's brains always respond 20 to 50% slower.

To say a single syllable in a syllable word, a normal person takes 1/4 second. The prolonged response time of autistic children can affect their ability to understand.

"This study provides further support for the recent emerging hypothesis that autism is a problem of brain connections. There may be unusual 'highways' or lack of connections in the brain. "It's like a highway with a few bumps that make it hard to get past , " Roberts said.

"We think that this delay in sound response is a biological signal that can be used to classify patients with autism."

Brain tissue microscopic tests in autism have shown that these people have much less intercellular connections.

Meanwhile, the CT scan does not find differences in the structure or brain size between normal people and autistic people.

Autism, the disease characterized by difficulty in communicating with others and sometimes repetitive behaviors, occurs at a rate of about 1 in 100 children in the UK. Children usually only detect disease at age 2.

But with this new technique, Roberts hopes to diagnose the disease sooner.