A paper makes the remarkable claim that autism could be detected through the use of ultrasound to peer beneath the skull. This paper is from 2014, but it just came to my attention. The authors of the piece, James Jeffrey Bradstreet, Stefania Pacini and Marco Ruggiero, studied 23 children with autism and 15 control children, who were unaffected siblings of the autistic group. Using ultrasound, the authors looked under the skull overlaying the brain's temporal cortex. The ultrasound revealed what lay beneath, including the meninges, the membranes that surround the brain, as well as the cortex itself:
Bradstreet et al. report finding two kinds of abnormalities in the children with autism. Firstly, there was an increased thickness of extra-axial fluid (EAF), a fluid-filled space between the arachnoid mater and the pia mater, two of the meninges. Secondly, there was cortical dysplasia - structural abnormalities in the cortex itself - namely ...
