Local brain connectivity across development in autism spectrum disorder: A cross-sectional investigation.
Local brain wiring in ASD shifts with age—early gaps fade, but extra hook-ups in higher areas keep social and repetitive symptoms strong.
01Research in Context
What this study did
The team scanned the kids, teens, and adults with ASD and 105 typical controls.
They measured local brain connectivity with fMRI while the person rested.
Everyone was split into age groups: 7-11, 12-17, and 18-45 years old.
What they found
Young ASD brains had weaker local links than typical brains.
By the teen years the gap closed, but a new twist showed up.
Extra local wiring in higher-order areas tracked with worse social and repetitive symptoms.
How this fits with other research
Iversen et al. (2021) pooled the kids and found poor executive function goes hand-in-hand with more repetitive behaviors. R et al.’s imaging data fit that story: the same older kids whose extra local wiring linked to worse symptoms also likely show the EF troubles Kvisler flagged.
Gandhi et al. (2022) asked teachers to rate Grade 1-the students. They saw big EF problems even when brain scans might soon look “normal.” This extends R et al.’s finding: classroom struggles remain even after the early connectivity gap fades.
Manning et al. (2013) saw motion-coherence deficits only at slow speeds, not fast ones. Likewise, R et al. show sensory regions stay under-connected while higher-order regions over-connect—both studies argue against a single, brain-wide deficit and for patchy, speed- or region-specific differences.
Why it matters
You can relax a little about early childhood scans; some under-connectivity lessens with age. Keep your focus on visible behaviors like set-shifting and repetitive play. If an older client’s symptoms spike, remember that extra local wiring in frontal areas may fuel both rigidity and poor executive function. Use EF drills and behavioral flexibility tasks instead of waiting for brain scans to “fix” themselves.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
There is a general consensus that autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is accompanied by alterations in brain connectivity. Much of the neuroimaging work has focused on assessing long-range connectivity disruptions in ASD. However, evidence from both animal models and postmortem examination of the human brain suggests that local connections may also be disrupted in individuals with the disorder. Here, we investigated how regional homogeneity (ReHo), a measure of similarity of a voxel's timeseries to its nearest neighbors, varies across age in individuals with ASD and typically developing (TD) individuals using a cross-sectional design. Resting-state fMRI data obtained from a publicly available database were analyzed to determine group differences in ReHo between three age cohorts: children, adolescents, and adults. In typical development, ReHo across the entire brain was higher in children than in adolescents and adults. In contrast, children with ASD exhibited marginally lower ReHo than TD children, while adolescents and adults with ASD exhibited similar levels of local connectivity as age-matched neurotypical individuals. During all developmental stages, individuals with ASD exhibited lower local connectivity in sensory processing brain regions and higher local connectivity in complex information processing regions. Further, higher local connectivity in ASD corresponded to more severe ASD symptomatology. These results demonstrate that local connectivity is disrupted in ASD across development, with the most pronounced differences occurring in childhood. Developmental changes in ReHo do not mirror findings from fMRI studies of long-range connectivity in ASD, pointing to a need for more nuanced accounts of brain connectivity alterations in the disorder.
Autism research : official journal of the International Society for Autism Research, 2016 · doi:10.1002/aur.1494