Decreased functional concordance in male children with autism spectrum disorder.
Looser teamwork across temporal-amygdala-frontal circuits marks autism and tracks repetitive behaviors.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Lu et al. (2023) scanned boys with and without autism while they rested.
The team looked at how well three brain areas fired together: temporal lobe, amygdala, and frontal cortex.
They wanted to see if weaker teamwork in these regions matched the child’s repetitive behaviors.
What they found
Kids with autism showed looser links between the three areas.
The weaker the links, the more rigid and repetitive the child’s actions.
Typical kids kept tight, steady teamwork in the same circuits.
How this fits with other research
Eussen et al. (2016) saw a mixed picture: one amygdala patch was under-connected while others were over-connected.
Huibin’s 2023 study sharpens the story by showing wide, steady under-connection across the whole circuit, not just patches.
Fu et al. (2022) add that these same limbic wires are also weaker in white-matter, hinting the problem is both structural and functional.
Together the papers trace a line: genes shape weaker wires, weaker wires show up on scans, and scans track repetitive behaviors.
Why it matters
You now have a brain marker you can point to when parents ask why routines feel stuck.
If a child’s repetitive score is high, expect looser temporal-amygdala-frontal teamwork on future imaging.
Use this to explain why broad, flexible teaching — not patchy drills — may help the whole circuit grow stronger.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is an early-onset neurodevelopmental condition with altered function of the brain. At present, a variety of functional metrics from neuroimaging techniques have been used to explore ASD neurological mechanisms. However, the concordance of these functional metrics in ASD is still unclear. This study used resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging data, which were obtained from the open-access Autism Brain Imaging Data Exchange database, including 105 children with ASD and 102 demographically matched typically developing (TD) children. Both voxel-wise and volume-wise functional concordance were calculated by combining the dynamic amplitude of low-frequency fluctuations, dynamic regional homogeneity, and dynamic global signal correlation. Furthermore, a two-sample t-test was performed to compare the functional concordance between ASD and TD groups. Finally, the relationship between voxel-wise functional concordance and Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule subscores was analyzed using the multivariate support vector regression in the ASD group. Compared with the TD group, we found that ASD showed decreased voxel-wise functional concordance in the left superior temporal pole (STGp), right amygdala, and left opercular part of the inferior frontal gyrus (IFGoper). Moreover, decreased functional concordance was associated with restricted and repetitive behaviors in ASD. Our results found altered brain function in the left STGp, right amygdala, and left IFGoper in ASD by functional concordance, indicating that functional concordance may provide new insights into the neurological mechanisms of ASD.
Autism research : official journal of the International Society for Autism Research, 2023 · doi:10.1002/aur.3035