A researcher has found an abnormality in the airways of children with autism that she says may be the first anatomical marker for the neurodevelopmental disorder.While examining children with autism who came in for a persistent cough, Dr. Barbara Stewart used a bronchoscope -- which can see down into the windpipe and the airways that branch into the lungs -- and noticed something different about those branches.
In a typical lung, the windpipe, or trachea, branches into two main stems. From there, airways branch off the stems much like tree branches in a random, asymmetrical pattern, said Stewart, a pediatric pulmonologist at Nemours Children's Clinic in Pensacola, Fla.
But in the autistic children, those branches were instead doubled up and symmetrical. And the branches were smaller -- whereas in a normal lung you might have one large branch jutting off, in the autistic child, she'd see two, smaller branches instead.
Stewart went back and looked at the bronchoscopy results of 49 children with autism spectrum disorder and more than 300 kids without the condition. She found that all of the kids with autism had what she calls symmetrical "doublets" in their airways, while none of the normally developing kids did.
"I don't know what the significance of that is ... But it looks like they have more of everything," Stewart said, adding that all of the autistic children had normal lung function and the anatomical difference may or may not explain the cough.
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