Atypicalities in the developmental trajectory of cortico-striatal functional connectivity in autism spectrum disorder

Autism ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 136236132110419
Author(s):  
Zeng-Hui Ma ◽  
Bin Lu ◽  
Xue Li ◽  
Ting Mei ◽  
Yan-Qing Guo ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Autism Spectrum Disorder ◽  
Functional Connectivity ◽  
Brain Connectivity ◽  
Autism Spectrum ◽  
Spectrum Disorder ◽  
Typically Developing ◽  
Sensorimotor Network ◽  
Intrinsic Functional Connectivity ◽  
Age Related ◽  
Atypical Development

The last decades of neuroimaging research has revealed atypical development of intrinsic functional connectivity within and between large-scale cortical networks in autism spectrum disorder, but much remains unknown about cortico-subcortical developmental connectivity atypicalities. This study examined cortico-striatal developmental intrinsic functional connectivity changes in autism spectrum disorder and explored how those changes may be correlated with autistic traits. We studied 49 individuals with autism spectrum disorder and 52 age-, sex-, and head motion–matched typically developing individuals (5–30 years old (14.0 ± 5.6)) using resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging. Age-related differences in striatal intrinsic functional connectivity were compared between the two groups by adopting functional network–based parcellations of the striatum as seeds. Relative to typically developing individuals, autism spectrum disorder individuals showed atypical developmental changes in intrinsic functional connectivities between almost all striatal networks and sensorimotor network/default network, with connectivity increasing with age in the autism spectrum disorder group and decreasing or constant in typically developing individuals. Age-related degree centrality and voxel-mirrored homotopic connectivity atypicalities in sensorimotor network/default network and voxel-mirrored homotopic connectivity disruptions in striatal regions were also observed in autism spectrum disorder. Significant correlations were found between cortico-striatal intrinsic functional connectivities and Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule communication/repetitive and restricted-behavior subscores in autism spectrum disorder. Our results indicated that developmental atypicalities of cortico-striatal intrinsic functional connectivities might contribute to the neuropathology of autism spectrum disorder. Lay abstract Autism spectrum disorder has long been conceptualized as a disorder of “atypical development of functional brain connectivity (which refers to correlations in activity levels of distant brain regions).” However, most of the research has focused on the connectivity between cortical regions, and much remains unknown about the developmental changes of functional connectivity between subcortical and cortical areas in autism spectrum disorder. We used the technique of resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging to explore the developmental characteristics of intrinsic functional connectivity (functional brain connectivity when people are asked not to do anything) between subcortical and cortical regions in individuals with and without autism spectrum disorder aged 6–30 years. We focused on one important subcortical structure called striatum, which has roles in motor, cognitive, and affective processes. We found that cortico-striatal intrinsic functional connectivities showed opposite developmental trajectories in autism spectrum disorder and typically developing individuals, with connectivity increasing with age in autism spectrum disorder and decreasing or constant in typically developing individuals. We also found significant negative behavioral correlations between those atypical cortico-striatal intrinsic functional connectivities and autistic symptoms, such as social-communication deficits, and restricted/repetitive behaviors and interests. Taken together, this work highlights that the atypical development of cortico-subcortical functional connectivity might be largely involved in the neuropathological mechanisms of autism spectrum disorder.

scholarly journals An Autism Spectrum Disorder Adaptive Identification Based on the Elimination of Brain Connections: A Proof of Long-Range Underconnectivity

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fatima zahra Benabdallah ◽  
Ahmed Drissi El Maliani ◽  
Dounia Lotfi ◽  
Rachid Jennane ◽  
Mohammed El hassouni
Keyword(s):  
Autism Spectrum Disorder ◽  
Functional Connectivity ◽  
Long Range ◽  
Data Exchange ◽  
Brain Connectivity ◽  
Brain Regions ◽  
Autism Spectrum ◽  
Spectrum Disorder ◽  
Imaging Data ◽  
Brain Imaging Data

Abstract Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is theoretically characterized by alterations in functional connectivity between brain regions. Many works presented approaches to determine informative patterns that help to predict autism from typical development. However, most of the proposed pipelines are not specifically designed for the autism problem, i.e they do not corroborate with autism theories about functional connectivity. In this paper, we propose a framework that takes into account the properties of local connectivity and long range under-connectivity in the autistic brain. The originality of the proposed approach is to adopt elimination as a technique in order to well emerge the autistic brain connectivity alterations, and show how they contribute to differentiate ASD from controls. Experimental results conducted on the large multi-site Autism Brain Imaging Data Exchange (ABIDE) show that our approach provides accurate prediction up to 70% and succeeds to prove the existence of deficits in the long-range connectivity in the ASD subjects brains.

scholarly journals Accounting for motion in fMRI: What part of the spectrum are we characterizing in autism spectrum disorder?

2022 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mary Beth Nebel ◽  
Daniel Lidstone ◽  
Liwei Wang ◽  
David Benkeser ◽  
Stewart H Mostofsky ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Autism Spectrum Disorder ◽  
Functional Connectivity ◽  
Autism Spectrum ◽  
Machine Learning Algorithms ◽  
Spectrum Disorder ◽  
Intellectual Ability ◽  
Typically Developing ◽  
Autistic Children ◽  
Typically Developing Children ◽  
The Impact

The exclusion of high-motion participants can reduce the impact of motion in functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) data. However, the exclusion of high-motion participants may change the distribution of clinically relevant variables in the study sample, and the resulting sample may not be representative of the population. Our goals are two-fold: 1) to document the biases introduced by common motion exclusion practices in functional connectivity research and 2) to introduce a framework to address these biases by treating excluded scans as a missing data problem. We use a study of autism spectrum disorder to illustrate the problem and the potential solution. We aggregated data from 545 children (8-13 years old) who participated in resting-state fMRI studies at Kennedy Krieger Institute (173 autistic and 372 typically developing) between 2007 and 2020. We found that autistic children were more likely to be excluded than typically developing children, with 29.1% and 16.1% of autistic and typically developing children excluded, respectively, using a lenient criterion and 80.8% and 59.8% with a stricter criterion. The resulting sample of autistic children with usable data tended to be older, have milder social deficits, better motor control, and higher intellectual ability than the original sample. These measures were also related to functional connectivity strength among children with usable data. This suggests that the generalizability of previous studies reporting naïve analyses (i.e., based only on participants with usable data) may be limited by the selection of older children with less severe clinical profiles because these children are better able to remain still during an rs-fMRI scan. We adapt doubly robust targeted minimum loss based estimation with an ensemble of machine learning algorithms to address these data losses and the resulting biases. The proposed approach selects more edges that differ in functional connectivity between autistic and typically developing children than the naïve approach, supporting this as a promising solution to improve the study of heterogeneous populations in which motion is common.

scholarly journals Intrinsic Functional Connectivity of Dentate Nuclei in Autism Spectrum Disorder

2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (9) ◽  
pp. 692-702 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sheeba Arnold Anteraper ◽  
Xavier Guell ◽  
Hoyt Patrick Taylor ◽  
Anila D'Mello ◽  
Susan Whitfield-Gabrieli ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Autism Spectrum Disorder ◽  
Functional Connectivity ◽  
Autism Spectrum ◽  
Spectrum Disorder ◽  
Intrinsic Functional Connectivity

scholarly journals Longitudinal Stability of Intellectual Functioning in Autism Spectrum Disorder: From Age 3 Through Mid-adulthood

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Molly B. D. Prigge ◽  
Erin D. Bigler ◽  
Nicholas Lange ◽  
Jubel Morgan ◽  
Alyson Froehlich ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Autism Spectrum Disorder ◽  
Early Adulthood ◽  
Autism Spectrum ◽  
Spectrum Disorder ◽  
Control Group ◽  
Typically Developing ◽  
Age Related ◽  
Iq Scores ◽  
Vocational Planning ◽  
The Stability

AbstractIntelligence (IQ) scores are used in educational and vocational planning for individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) yet little is known about the stability of IQ throughout development. We examined longitudinal age-related IQ stability in 119 individuals with ASD (3–36 years of age at first visit) and 128 typically developing controls. Intelligence measures were collected over a 20-year period. In ASD, Full Scale (FSIQ) and Verbal (VIQ) Intelligence started lower in childhood and increased at a greater rate with age relative to the control group. By early adulthood, VIQ and working memory stabilized, whereas nonverbal and perceptual scores continued to change. Our results suggest that in individuals with ASD, IQ estimates may be dynamic in childhood and young adulthood.

Different aberrant mentalizing networks in males and females with autism spectrum disorders: Evidence from resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging

Autism ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 134-148 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jie Yang ◽  
Jonathan Lee
Keyword(s):  
Autism Spectrum Disorder ◽  
Sex Differences ◽  
Functional Connectivity ◽  
Autism Spectrum ◽  
Spectrum Disorder ◽  
Typically Developing ◽  
Imaging Data ◽  
Functional Magnetic Resonance ◽  
Males And Females ◽  
Spectrum Disorders

Previous studies have found that individuals with autism spectrum disorders show impairments in mentalizing processes and aberrant brain activity compared with typically developing participants. However, the findings are mainly from male participants and the aberrant effects in autism spectrum disorder females and sex differences are still unclear. To address these issues, this study analyzed intrinsic functional connectivity of mentalizing regions using resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging data of 48 autism spectrum disorder males and females and 48 typically developing participants in autism brain imaging data exchange. Whole-brain analyses showed that autism spectrum disorder males had hyperconnectivity in functional connectivity of the bilateral temporal-parietal junction, whereas autism spectrum disorder females showed hypoconnectivity in functional connectivity of the medial prefrontal cortex, precuneus, and right temporal-parietal junction. Interaction between sex and autism was found in both short- and long-distance functional connectivity effects, confirming that autism spectrum disorder males showed overconnectivity, while autism spectrum disorder females showed underconnectivity. Furthermore, a regression analysis revealed that in autism spectrum disorder, males and females demonstrated different relations between the functional connectivity effects of the mentalizing regions and the core autism spectrum disorder deficits. These results suggest sex differences in the mentalizing network in autism spectrum disorder individuals. Future work is needed to examine how sex interacts with other factors such as age and the sex differences during mentalizing task performance.

scholarly journals Constructing high-order functional connectivity network based on central moment features for diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder

PeerJ ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 9 ◽  
pp. e11692
Author(s):  
Qingsong Xie ◽  
Xiangfei Zhang ◽  
Islem Rekik ◽  
Xiaobo Chen ◽  
Ning Mao ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Autism Spectrum Disorder ◽  
Functional Connectivity ◽  
Neurological Diseases ◽  
Brain Connectivity ◽  
Brain Regions ◽  
Autism Spectrum ◽  
Central Moment ◽  
High Order ◽  
Spectrum Disorder ◽  
Moment Feature

The sliding-window-based dynamic functional connectivity network (D-FCN) has been becoming an increasingly useful tool for understanding the changes of brain connectivity patterns and the association of neurological diseases with these dynamic variations. However, conventional D-FCN is essentially low-order network, which only reflects the pairwise interaction pattern between brain regions and thus overlooking the high-order interactions among multiple brain regions. In addition, D-FCN is innate with temporal sensitivity issue, i.e., D-FCN is sensitive to the chronological order of its subnetworks. To deal with the above issues, we propose a novel high-order functional connectivity network framework based on the central moment feature of D-FCN. Specifically, we firstly adopt a central moment approach to extract multiple central moment feature matrices from D-FCN. Furthermore, we regard the matrices as the profiles to build multiple high-order functional connectivity networks which further capture the higher level and more complex interaction relationships among multiple brain regions. Finally, we use the voting strategy to combine the high-order networks with D-FCN for autism spectrum disorder diagnosis. Experimental results show that the combination of multiple functional connectivity networks achieves accuracy of 88.06%, and the best single network achieves accuracy of 79.5%.

scholarly journals Altered intrinsic functional connectivity of anterior and posterior insula regions in high-functioning participants with autism spectrum disorder

2010 ◽  
Vol 32 (7) ◽  
pp. 1013-1028 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sjoerd J.H. Ebisch ◽  
Vittorio Gallese ◽  
Roel M. Willems ◽  
Dante Mantini ◽  
Wouter B. Groen ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Autism Spectrum Disorder ◽  
Functional Connectivity ◽  
Autism Spectrum ◽  
Spectrum Disorder ◽  
High Functioning ◽  
Intrinsic Functional Connectivity ◽  
Posterior Insula

scholarly journals Sex-related patterns of intrinsic functional connectivity in children and adolescents with autism spectrum disorders

Autism ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 24 (8) ◽  
pp. 2190-2201 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lindsay A Olson ◽  
Lisa E Mash ◽  
Annika Linke ◽  
Christopher H Fong ◽  
Ralph-Axel Müller ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Autism Spectrum Disorder ◽  
Autism Spectrum Disorders ◽  
Functional Connectivity ◽  
Children And Adolescents ◽  
Resting State ◽  
Autism Spectrum ◽  
Spectrum Disorder ◽  
Typically Developing ◽  
Adolescents With Autism ◽  
Spectrum Disorders

Although a growing literature highlights sex differences in autism spectrum disorder clinical presentation, less is known about female variants at the neural level. We investigated sex-related patterns of functional connectivity within and between functional networks in children and adolescents with autism spectrum disorders, compared to typically developing peers. Resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging data for 141 children and adolescents (7–17 years) selected from an in-house sample and four sites contributing to the Autism Brain Imaging Database Exchange (ABIDE I and II) were submitted to group independent component analysis to generate resting-state functional networks. Functional connectivity was estimated by generating resting-state functional network correlation matrices, which were directly compared between males and females, and autism spectrum disorder and typically developing groups. Results revealed greater connectivity within the default mode network in typically developing girls as compared to typically developing boys, while no such sex effect was observed in the autism spectrum disorder group. Correlational analyses with clinical indices revealed a negative relationship between sensorimotor connectivity and history of early autism symptoms in girls, but not in boys with autism spectrum disorder. A lack of neurotypical sex differentiation in default mode network functional connectivity observed in boys and girls with autism spectrum disorder suggests that sex-related differences in network integration may be altered in autism spectrum disorder. Lay summary We investigated whether children and adolescents with autism spectrum disorders show sex-specific patterns of brain function (using functional magnetic resonance imaging) that are well documented in typically developing males and females. We found, unexpectedly, that boys and girls with autism do not differ in their brain functional connectivity, whereas typically developing boys and girls showed differences in a brain network involved in thinking about self and others (the default mode network). Results suggest that autism may be characterized by a lack of brain sex differentiation.

scholarly journals Age-related parietal GABA alterations in children with Autism Spectrum Disorder

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marilena M DeMayo ◽  
Yun Song ◽  
Izabella Pokorski ◽  
Ashley D Harris ◽  
Rinku Thapa ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Autism Spectrum Disorder ◽  
Parietal Lobe ◽  
Autism Spectrum ◽  
Developmental Trajectory ◽  
Spectrum Disorder ◽  
Resonance Spectroscopy ◽  
Typically Developing ◽  
Gaba Concentration ◽  
Children With Asd ◽  
Age Related

Background: Alterations to the gamma-aminobutyric acid-ergic (GABAergic) system have been proposed to contribute to the development of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). GABA is the primary inhibitory neurotransmitter in the brain, and is essential to the balance of cortical excitation and inhibition. Reductions in GABA are proposed to result in an overly excitatory cortex that may cause, or contribute to, symptoms of ASD.Methods: This study employed a cross-sectional design to explore the developmental trajectory of GABA+ and differences in GABA+ levels between children with ASD and typically developing (TD) children. A total of 26 children diagnosed with ASD, aged between 4-12 years were compared to 35 typically developing children. GABA+ concentration was measured in vivo using edited magnetic resonance spectroscopy (MRS) in the left parietal lobe, a region important for social cognition and language. The MRS sequence used measures both GABA and macromolecules, and is therefore denoted as GABA+. Results: The ASD group showed lower GABA+ concentration at younger ages, with GABA levels gradually increasing with age. By the age of 9, children with ASD showed GABA levels that were comparable to their TD peers. TD children did not show age-related change in GABA+ concentration. Conclusions: This study provides additional evidence for initially lower levels of GABA+ in children with ASD compared to their TD peers. Further, it evidences distinct age-related changes in GABA+ concentration in the left parietal lobe that do not occur in TD children. It is suggested that this developmental shift of GABA+ levels provides a possible explanation for the previously found reductions in childhood that does not appear in studies investigating differences in adults. As in, GABA levels in ASD may be lower in younger children as shown in a number of previous studies, but increase with age, resulting in no differences in adults with ASD compared to TD.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document