New 'eye movement' test may help treat fetal alcoho...( ory understanding and reasoning as we...),Health

The next stage of the Queen's research will be to make the eye movement test mobile and transport it to targeted areas, such as northern and rural parts of Ontario, where FASD is believed to be more prevalent. The researchers envision this as a multi-centre project, in which other participants will work from the same set of pooled data.

"There is a clear need to develop new tools that can be used to reliably and objectively measure the brain injury of FASD," says Dr. Reynolds. "Ideally, these tools need to be mobile, inexpensive, and easy to use, for both diagnosis and the long-term evaluation of therapeutic interventions. Eye movements are ideally suited for this purpose."

Using the new functional MRI facility at Queen's, the team will then be able to measure differences in brain activity between children with fetal alcohol syndrome and those with other developmental disorders such as ADHD.

"Having access to this facility will have a huge impact on our research program," Dr. Reynolds says. "It allows us to create an integrated research strategy for carrying out studies to provide functional brain imaging data that can be directly related to neuro-behavioural deficits in individual children with FASD."

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Contact: Nancy Dorrance
dorrance@post.queensu.ca
613-533-2869
Queen's University
11-Nov-2005