Atypicalities in the developmental trajectory of cortico-striatal functional connectivity in autism spectrum disorder.
In ASD, cortico-striatal brain connectivity strengthens abnormally with age and tracks symptom severity — no immediate clinical metric yet, but a potential biomarker to watch.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Ma et al. (2022) scanned brains of people with and without autism. They tracked how tightly the cortex talks to the striatum as age goes up.
The team used resting-state fMRI. They looked at six to thirty year olds and linked connection strength to ADOS scores.
What they found
In typical brains, cortico-striatal connectivity stays flat or drops with age. In ASD it climbs as people get older.
Stronger climb matched worse social and repetitive behavior scores. The pattern acts like a slow-moving brain signature of symptom depth.
How this fits with other research
Mazurek et al. (2019) saw the same circuits but at one time point. They found overlinks to sensory areas and underlinks to higher-order areas. Zeng-Hui adds the age layer, showing the overlink keeps growing.
Stevens et al. (2018) looked at kids doing a motor task. Typical kids turned connectivity down; autistic kids turned it up. The direction flip matches Zeng-Hui’s climb, giving a task-based twin to the resting-state story.
Capio et al. (2013) tracked white-matter maturation. Myelin normally refines with age, but ASD showed flat diffusivity. Zeng-Hui shows the functional side of that stall: the wire stays noisy and the signal keeps rising.
Why it matters
You can’t see cortico-striatal connectivity with a checklist, but you can watch symptom slope. If an teen’s RRBs are speeding up, the brain data say the loop is too. Use that to advocate for intense intervention now, before the gap widens. Pair motor or social skills drills with reward-heavy trials that tap the same loop and track progress weekly.
Want CEUs on This Topic?
The ABA Clubhouse has 60+ free CEUs — live every Wednesday. Ethics, supervision & clinical topics.
Join Free →Graph your client’s RRB frequency for the last six months; if the line is rising, boost reward density in response-blocking routines this week.
02At a glance
03Original 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.
Autism : the international journal of research and practice, 2022 · doi:10.1177/13623613211041904