Abstract
Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a heterogeneous disorder characterized by different levels of repetitive and stereotypic behavior as well as deficits in social interaction and communication. In this current study, we explored the changes in cerebral neural activities in ASD. The purpose of this study is to investigate whether there exists a dysfunction of interactive information processing between the prefrontal cortex and posterior brain regions in ASD. We investigated the atypical connectivity and information flow between the prefrontal cortex and posterior brain regions in ASD utilizing the entropy connectivity (a kind of directional connectivity) method. Eighty-nine patients with ASD and 94 typical developing (TD) teenagers participated in this study. Two-sample t-tests revealed weakened interactive entropy connectivity between the prefrontal cortex and posterior brain regions. This result indicates that there exists interactive prefrontal-posterior underconnectivity in ASD, and this disorder might lead to less prior knowledge being used and updated. Our proposals highlighted that aforementioned atypical change might accelerate the deoptimization of brain networks in ASD.
Highlights
Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a neurodevelopmental disorder
A chi-squared test revealed no significant difference in sex between the ASD and typical developing (TD) groups
In the current study based on resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), we found that the right dorsolateral prefrontal lobe (BA 46R) in ASD displayed weakened synchronous output entropy connectivity to the ipsilateral parietal lobule (BA 7R) but asynchronous output entropy connectivity to the contralateral angular gyrus (BA 39L), and previous literature has reported that Brodmann area (BA) 7R is involved in the mental manipulation of information in working memory (Koenigs et al, 2009), the coordination of visual–tactile conflict (Ro et al, 2004) and visual-spatial processing (Ro et al, 2004)
Summary
Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a neurodevelopmental disorder. According to the data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported in 2020, one out of every 54 children is diagnosed with ASD. Neuroimaging studies found that ASDs presented atypical functional connectivity patterns in brains, such as underconnectivity (Just et al, 2004; Schipul et al, 2011; Starck et al, 2013), overconnectivity (Delmonte et al, 2013; Li et al, 2020; Seghatol-Eslami et al, 2020) and mixed connectivity (Monk et al, 2009; Chen et al, 2018; Oldehinkel et al, 2019) These altered functional connections affect the functions of multisensory, social communication, and high-level cognitive activities. Previous studies detected abnormalities within language networks of ASD which depend on directional connectivity pattern from the precuneus via caudate nucleus to interior frontal gyrus rather than the connectivity pattern from the interior frontal gyrus via caudate nucleus to the precuneus by using dynamic causal modeling (DCM) (Radulescu et al, 2013) and verified underconnectivity between brain regions of ASD utilizing transfer entropy and graph theory (Ejman et al, 2017)
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