Abnormal gray matter volume and functional connectivity patterns in social cognition-related brain regions of young children with autism spectrum disorder.
A mix of extra gray matter and weak social-circuit links lets MRI spot ASD in preschoolers with 86 % accuracy.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Bai et al. (2023) scanned 2- to 7-year-olds with and without autism.
They used research-grade MRI to measure gray-matter volume and wiring strength in social-cognition brain areas.
A computer model then tried to tell ASD from typical kids using only the brain pictures.
What they found
Kids with autism had extra gray matter and weaker cross-talk in social-cognition hubs.
The brain combo picked out ASD from typical kids with 86 % accuracy.
How this fits with other research
Seng et al. (2022) looked at teens, not toddlers, and links smaller left supramarginal gyrus to insistence on sameness.
Together the two studies show gray-matter shifts travel with different core traits across age groups.
Lefevre et al. (2020) seems to clash: adults with autism lose the normal link between serotonin receptors, gray matter, and sociability.
The gap is age: adult brains may down-regulate the very regions that start out oversized in toddlers.
Storch et al. (2012) found 90 % of routine clinical MRIs looked normal in high-functioning kids.
Chen’s research-grade scans beat that because they pair structure with function and target younger, more varied children.
Why it matters
You can’t order a research MRI for every toddler, but you can borrow the pattern.
When social skills lag, remember the brain may be running an over-grown, under-connected setup.
Focus early ABA on strengthening social-cognition networks while the brain is still plastic.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is associated with abnormal brain imaging findings, but descriptions thereof are inconsistent. The aim of the present study was to investigate brain abnormalities in young children with ASD using a combination of structural and functional brain magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). Structural and resting-state functional MRI was performed in 67 children with ASD (aged 2-7 years) and 39 age-matched typically developing (TD) controls. Voxel-based morphometry was used to evaluate differences in brain structure between groups. Topologic parameters of the functional brain network were compared by graph theoretic analysis and network connectomes were compared with network-based statistics. A support vector machine (SVM) was used to discriminate between ASD and TD groups. Results demonstrated young children with ASD had increased gray matter volumes (GMVs) in the right medial superior frontal gyrus and left fusiform gyrus compared with the TD group. The ASD group had altered subnetwork connectivity in frontal and temporal lobes and other social cognition-related brain regions. Functional connectivity in the left superior temporal gyrus and left temporal pole of the middle temporal gyrus was positively correlated with adaptability and language developmental quotient (DQ) in children with ASD. The combination of the brain structural and functional features had 86.2% accuracy in discriminating between ASD and TD. The present study shows that young children with ASD have altered GMVs and functional networks in social cognition-related brain regions, which are potential neuroimaging biomarkers for ASD.
Autism research : official journal of the International Society for Autism Research, 2023 · doi:10.1002/aur.2936