Sex heterogeneity of dynamic brain activity and functional connectivity in autism spectrum disorder.
Autistic girls and boys carry distinct moment-to-moment ACC/mPFC fingerprints, so sex-aware baselines are required.
01Research in Context
What this study did
The team used dynamic fMRI to watch brain activity shift moment-to-moment.
They compared girls and boys with autism to neurotypical kids.
The lens was on the ACC and mPFC, two hubs that steer attention and emotion.
What they found
Girls and boys with ASD showed different time-varying signatures in these hubs.
The patterns were not the same across sex, hinting that autism lives differently in female and male brains.
How this fits with other research
Li et al. (2024) saw the same year that girls with ASD drive global efficiency changes, while boys do not.
Together the papers form a replication: sex splits the wiring picture in autism.
He et al. (2018) had earlier found less flexible default-mode networks in young children with ASD.
Huibin et al. now extend that work by showing sex further sculpts the variability, not just diagnosis.
Why it matters
If brain markers move one way in autistic girls and another in boys, a single "autism profile" will miss half the picture.
You can press for sex-split norms in imaging reports and choose tasks that tap either ACC self-monitoring or mPFC social tracking, depending on the learner’s sex.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Sex heterogeneity has been frequently reported in autism spectrum disorders (ASD) and has been linked to static differences in brain function. However, given the complexity of ASD and diagnosis-by-sex interactions, dynamic characteristics of brain activity and functional connectivity may provide important information for distinguishing ASD phenotypes between females and males. The aim of this study was to explore sex heterogeneity of functional networks in the ASD brain from a dynamic perspective. Resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging data from the Autism Brain Imaging Data Exchange database were analyzed in 128 ASD subjects (64 males/64 females) and 128 typically developing control (TC) subjects (64 males/64 females). A sliding-window approach was adopted for the estimation of dynamic amplitude of low-frequency fluctuation (dALFF) and dynamic functional connectivity (dFC) to characterize time-varying brain activity and functional connectivity respectively. We then examined the sex-related changes in ASD using two-way analysis of variance. Significant diagnosis-by-sex interaction effects were identified in the left anterior cingulate cortex/medial prefrontal cortex (ACC/mPFC) and left precuneus in the dALFF analysis. Furthermore, there were significant diagnosis-by-sex interaction effects of dFC variance between the left ACC/mPFC and right ACC, left postcentral gyrus, left precuneus, right middle temporal gyrus and left inferior frontal gyrus, triangular part. These findings reveal the sex heterogeneity in brain activity and functional connectivity in ASD from a dynamic perspective, and provide new evidence for further exploring sex heterogeneity in ASD.
Autism research : official journal of the International Society for Autism Research, 2024 · doi:10.1002/aur.3227