Background: Although differences in brain anatomy in autism have been difficult to replicate using manual tracing methods, automated whole brain analyses have begun to find consistent differences in regions of the brain associated with the social cognitive processes that are often impaired in autism. We attempted to replicate these whole brain studies and to correlate regional volume changes with several autism symptom measures.

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Rationale and Objectives-While multiple detector CT (MDCT) and hyperpolarized gas MRI (HP MRI) have demonstrated ability to detect structural and ventilation abnormalities in asthma, few studies have sought to exploit or cross-validate the regional information provided by these techniques. The purpose of this work is to assess regional disease in asthma by evaluating the association of sites of ventilation defect on HP MRI with other regional markers of airway disease, including air trapping on MDCT and inflammatory markers on bronchoscopy.Materials and Methods-Both HP MRI using helium-3 and MDCT were acquired in the same patients. Supervised segmentation of the lung lobes on MRI and MDCT facilitated regional comparisons of ventilation abnormalities in the lung parenchyma. The percentage of spatial overlap was evaluated between regions of ventilation defect on HP MRI and hyperlucency on MDCT to determine associations between obstruction and likely regions of gas trapping.. Similarly, lung lobes with high defect volume were compared to lobes with low defect volume for differences in inflammatory cell number and percentage using bronchoscopic assessment.Results-There was significant overlap between sites of ventilation defect on HP MRI and hyperlucency on MDCT suggesting that sites of airway obstruction and air trapping are associated in asthma. The percent (r = 0.68; p = 0.0039) and absolute (r = 0.61; p = 0.0125) number of neutrophils on bronchoalveolar lavage (BAL) for the sampled lung lobe also directly correlated with increased defect volume.Conclusion-These results show promise for using image guidance to assess specific regions of ventilation defect or air trapping in heterogeneous obstructive lung diseases such as asthma.

A group of 164 children from different infant temperament categories were seen at 7 years of age for a laboratory battery that included behavioral and physiological measurements. The major results indicated that children who had been classified as high reactive infants at 4 months of age, compared with infants classified as low reactive, (a) were more vulnerable to the development of anxious symptoms at age 7 years, (b) were more subdued in their interactions with a female examiner, (c) made fewer errors on a task requiring inhibition of a reflex, and (d) were more reflective. Further, the high reactives who developed anxious symptoms differed from the high reactives without anxious symptoms with respect to fearful behavior in the second year and, at age 7 years, higher diastolic blood pressure, a narrower facial skeleton, and greater magnitude of cooling of the temperature of the fingertips to cognitive challenge. Finally, variation in magnitude of interference to fearful or aggressive pictures on a modified Stroop procedure failed to differentiate anxious from nonanxious or high from low reactive children. This research was supported by grants from the W. T. Grant Foundation and the John D. and Catherine T. Mac-showed the opposite profile of infrequent mo-Arthur Network on Psychopathology and Development. tor activity and infrequent fretting and crying We thank Jenny Mongkolcheep for her contribution to were classified as low reactive (40% of the the study.