Atypical effective connectivity of thalamo-cortical circuits in autism spectrum disorder.
Weak thalamo-temporal brain signals line up with poorer communication scores in autism.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Chen et al. (2016) scanned adults and teens with autism while they rested. The team tracked how the thalamus talks to the cortex. They used a math tool called effective connectivity to see which way the signals flow.
What they found
The autism group had weaker signals from the thalamus to both sides of the temporal lobe. Links to the left prefrontal and right parietal areas were also low. The weaker the thalamo-temporal link, the lower the ADOS communication score.
How this fits with other research
Kovačič et al. (2020) repeated the idea with more people and mapped the whole brain. They still found weak temporal connections, so the 2016 picture holds.
Mazurek et al. (2019) looked wider and saw a twist. They found over-strong links between subcortical and sensory areas but under-strong links to higher-order areas. The 2016 study focused on the weak side, so the two papers together show a push-pull pattern.
Ma et al. (2022) tracked kids as they grew. Cortico-striatal links got stronger with age in autism, the opposite of typical kids. This adds a time angle: weak thalamo-cortical links in teens may grow into different striatal patterns later.
Why it matters
You cannot fix thalamo-cortical circuits with a prompt yet. Still, knowing that weak thalamo-temporal links track communication scores gives you a brain reason for language plateaus. When you see a client with flat ADOS communication, think sensory gating issues. Try brief auditory or visual priming before language trials. It may boost input reach.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a neurodevelopment disorder characterized by atypical connectivity within and across multiple brain systems. We aimed to explore information transmission from the sensory periphery to information processing centers of the brain across thalamo-cortical circuits in ASD. A large multicenter dataset from the autism brain imaging data exchange was utilized. A thalamus template derived from the Automatic Anatomic Labeling atlas was subdivided into six subregions corresponding to six cortical regions using a "winner-takes-all" strategy. Granger causality analysis (GCA) was then applied to calculate effective connectivity from subregions of the thalamus to the corresponding cortical regions. Results demonstrate reduced effective connectivity from the thalamus to left prefrontal cortex (P = 0.023), right posterior parietal cortex (P = 0.03), and bilateral temporal cortex (left: P = 0.014; right: P = 0.015) in ASD compared with healthy control (HC) participants. The GCA values of the thalamus-bilateral temporal cortex connections were significantly negatively correlated with communication scores as assessed by the autism diagnostic observation schedule in the ASD group (left: P = 0.037; right: P = 0.007). Age-related analyses showed that the strengths of the thalamus-bilateral temporal cortex connections were significantly positively correlated with age in the HC group (left: P = 0.013; right: P = 0.016), but not in the ASD group (left: P = 0.506; right: P = 0.219). These results demonstrate impaired thalamo-cortical information transmission in ASD and suggest that atypical development of thalamus-temporal cortex connections may relate to communication deficits in the disorder. Autism Res 2016, 9: 1183-1190. © 2016 International Society for Autism Research, Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
Autism research : official journal of the International Society for Autism Research, 2016 · doi:10.1002/aur.1614