Abstract
Characterizing the nature of developmental change is critical to understanding the mechanisms that are impaired in complex neurodevelopment disorders such as autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and, pragmatically, may allow us to pinpoint periods of plasticity when interventions are particularly useful. Although aberrant brain development has long been theorized as a characteristic feature of ASD, the neural substrates have been difficult to characterize, in part due to a lack of developmental data and to performance confounds. To address these issues, we examined the development of intrinsic functional connectivity, with resting state fMRI from late childhood to early adulthood (8–36 years), using a seed based functional connectivity method with the striatal regions. Overall, we found that both groups show decreases in cortico-striatal circuits over age. However, when controlling for age, ASD participants showed increased connectivity with parietal cortex and decreased connectivity with prefrontal cortex relative to typically developed (TD) participants. In addition, ASD participants showed aberrant age-related connectivity with anterior aspects of cerebellum, and posterior temporal regions (e.g., fusiform gyrus, inferior and superior temporal gyri). In sum, we found prominent differences in the development of striatal connectivity in ASD, most notably, atypical development of connectivity in striatal networks that may underlie cognitive and social reward processing. Our findings highlight the need to identify the biological mechanisms of perturbations in brain reorganization over development, which may also help clarify discrepant findings in the literature.
Highlights
A recent focus in autism research is the differences in functional connectivity in autism spectrum disorder (ASD)
Examining resting state functional connectivity may help address some of the discrepant findings, as it provides a measure of intrinsic functional connectivity without the task-related differences that confound comparisons across different age and clinical groups
We examined striatal resting state functional connectivity across the ages of 8–36 years in individuals diagnosed with ASD, relative to typically developing individuals
Summary
A recent focus in autism research is the differences in functional connectivity in autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Similar to the task-based literature, much of the prior resting state connectivity research testing individuals with ASD has suggested overall decreases in intrinsic connectivity (Cherkassky et al, 2006; Kennedy and Courchesne, 2008; Monk et al, 2009; Assaf et al, 2010; Jones et al, 2010; Weng et al, 2010; Anderson et al, 2011; Dinstein et al, 2011; Ebisch et al, 2011; Gotts et al, 2012; Rudie et al, 2012a; Mueller et al, 2013; Tyszka et al, 2013; von dem Hagen et al, 2013), while some others have found increases (Noonan et al, 2009; Di Martino et al, 2011; Delmonte et al, 2013; Lynch et al, 2013; Uddin et al, 2013a; Washington et al, 2013) Taken together, these findings suggest that the nature of connectivity differences in ASD is not yet fully characterized.
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