Sex Differences in Spatiotemporal Consistency and Effective Connectivity of the Precuneus in Autism Spectrum Disorder.
Male and female ASD brains show opposite patterns of precuneus activity consistency—consider sex when interpreting neuroimaging biomarkers.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Gao et al. (2024) scanned autistic and neurotypical adults while they rested.
The team looked at the precuneus, a hub in the default-mode network.
They asked: do males and females with autism show opposite brain-timing patterns?
What they found
Males with autism had more stable precuneus activity than neurotypical males.
Females with autism showed less stable activity than neurotypical females.
The two sexes moved in mirror-image directions, not just mild shades of the same trend.
How this fits with other research
Wormald et al. (2019) saw no sex gap on the SRS-2 in high-functioning youth.
The new scan data do not cancel that result; they simply show biology can diverge even when behavior looks alike.
Souza et al. (2023) and Emerson et al. (2023) already warned that girls with autism often carry more intellectual disability while boys show more repetitive moves.
Le et al. now add a neural signature that fits the same sex-by-diagnosis picture.
Why it matters
If you interpret neuroimaging reports for girls and boys the same way, you may miss the story.
Push radiologists and referral teams to run sex-stratified analyses.
When a girl’s scan looks “borderline,” remember her control group may sit at the other pole than a boy’s.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) has been reported to exhibit altered local functional consistency. However, previous studies mainly focused on male samples and explored the temporal consistency in the ASD brain ignoring the spatial consistency. In this study, FOur-dimensional Consistency of local neural Activities (FOCA) analysis was used to investigate the sex differences of local spatiotemporal consistency of spontaneous brain activity in ASD. This study used resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging data from the Autism Brain Imaging Data Exchange database, including 64 males/64 females with ASD and 64 male/64 female neurotypical controls (NCs). Two-way analysis of variance was performed to ascertain diagnosis-by-sex interaction effects on whole brain FOCA maps. Moreover, granger causal analysis was used to investigate effective connectivity between the brain regions with interaction effects and the whole-brain in ASD. Significant diagnosis-by-sex interaction effects on FOCA were observed in the bilateral precuneus (PCUN), bilateral medial prefrontal cortex and right dorsolateral superior frontal gyrus. Specifically, FOCA was significantly increased in males with ASD but decreased in females with ASD in the PCUN compared with the sex-matched NC group. In addition, the lack of sex differences in the causal influences from the bilateral anterior cingulate cortex/medial prefrontal cortex to the PCUN was observed in ASD. Our results reveal altered sex differences in the spatiotemporal consistency of spontaneous brain activity and functional interaction of the anterior and posterior default mode network (DMN) in ASD, highlighting the critical role of the DMN in the sex heterogeneity of ASD.
Journal of autism and developmental disorders, 2024 · doi:10.1016/j.neubiorev.2014.05.009