Abstract
Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a devastating mental disorder in children. Currently, there is no effective treatment for ASD. Transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS), which is a non-invasive brain stimulation neuromodulation technology, is a promising method for the treatment of ASD. However, the manner in which tDCS changes the electrophysiological process in the brain is still unclear. In this study, we used tDCS to stimulate the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex area of children with ASD (one group received anode tDCS, and the other received sham tDCS) and investigated the changes in evoked EEG signals and behavioral abilities before and after anode and sham stimulations. In addition to tDCS, all patients received conventional rehabilitation treatment. Results show that although conventional treatment can effectively improve the behavioral ability of children with ASD, the use of anode tDCS with conventional rehabilitation can boost this improvement, thus leading to increased treatment efficacy. By analyzing the electroencephalography pre- and post-treatment, we noticed a decrease in the mismatch negativity (MMN) latency and an increase in the MMN amplitude in both groups, these features are considered similar to MMN features from healthy children. However, no statistical difference between the two groups was observed after 4 weeks of treatment. In addition, the MMN features correlate well with the aberrant behavior checklist (ABC) scale, particularly the amplitude of MMN, thus suggesting the feasibility of using MMN features to assess the behavioral ability of children with ASD.
Highlights
Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a biologically based neurodevelopmental disorder that is defined by the following diagnostic criteria: deficits in social communication and interaction and presence of restricted, repetitive patterns of behavior, interests, or activities that can persist throughout life (Battle, 2013; Principi and Esposito, 2020)
The comparison between the two groups of patients showed that the atDCS group performed significantly better than the stDCS group, indicating that the anode Transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) has a positive effect on the treatment of ASD
The results show that the changes in the amplitudes of the proposed three types of deviant stimuli are linearly related to the changes in the aberrant behavior checklist (ABC) scale scores, indicating that mismatch negativity (MMN) features can reflect the behavioral ability of children with ASD and can be used as an objective and quantitative evaluation method
Summary
Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a biologically based neurodevelopmental disorder (developmental disability) that is defined by the following diagnostic criteria: deficits in social communication and interaction and presence of restricted, repetitive patterns of behavior, interests, or activities that can persist throughout life (Battle, 2013; Principi and Esposito, 2020). The. MMN Features in Autism Under TDCS population of children with ASD is generally large; approximately 1 in 54 children has been identified with ASD in the United States in 2016 (Maenner et al, 2020). There are no exact statistics on the number of patients with ASD in China. The prevalence of ASD is increasing year by year, with the United States experiencing an increase of 150% from 2000 to 2014. This situation is more severe in China, which has a rate of increase of 200,000 ASD cases per year. The increasing incidence of ASD is a problem that needs the attention of the global community
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