Abstract
The gold standard for clinical assessment of Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) relies on assessing behavior via semi-structured play-based interviews and parent interviews. Although these methods show good sensitivity and specificity in diagnosing ASD cases, behavioral assessments alone may hinder the identification of asymptomatic at-risk group. Resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (rs-fMRI) could be an appropriate approach to produce objective neural markers to supplement behavioral assessments due to its non-invasive and task-free nature. Previous neuroimaging studies reported inconsistent resting-state abnormalities in ASD, which may be explained by small sample sizes and phenotypic heterogeneity in ASD subjects, and/or the use of different analytical methods across studies. The current study aims to investigate the local resting-state abnormalities of ASD regardless of subject age, IQ, gender, disease severity and methodological differences, using activation likelihood estimation (ALE). MEDLINE/PubMed databases were searched for whole-brain rs-fMRI studies on ASD published until Feb 2018. Eight experiments involving 424 subjects were included in the ALE meta-analysis. We demonstrate two ASD-related resting-state findings: local underconnectivity in the dorsal posterior cingulate cortex (PCC) and in the right medial paracentral lobule. This study contributes to uncovering a consistent pattern of resting-state local abnormalities that may serve as potential neurobiological markers for ASD.
Highlights
To date, the gold standard for clinical assessment of Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) includes administration of the Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule 2 (ADOS-2)[9] and the Autism Diagnostic Interview-Revised (ADI-R)[10] that assess behavior by semi-structured play-based interviews and parent interviews, respectively
Based on the activation likelihood estimation (ALE) output, the right medial paracentral lobule cluster was contributed by foci from three studies[23,26,28], and the dorsal posterior cingulate cortex (PCC) cluster was contributed by foci from two studies[23,26]
The right medial paracentral lobule was not found to be engaged in any of the domains/sub-domains. In this ALE study, we observed consistently lower resting-state local connectivity in the dorsal PCC and right medial paracentral lobule in subjects with ASD compared to typically developing (TD) controls across eight different studies that included subjects with mixed characteristics
Summary
The gold standard for clinical assessment of ASD includes administration of the Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule 2 (ADOS-2)[9] and the Autism Diagnostic Interview-Revised (ADI-R)[10] that assess behavior by semi-structured play-based interviews and parent interviews, respectively. In a large population-based study, the presence of ADHD and/or sensory processing symptoms in children with ASD delayed an autism diagnosis for around 3 years[12] These add to the difficulty of admitting clinical cases into the right intervention program before school age, which significantly reduces the effectiveness of behavioral therapies www.nature.com/scientificreports/. Philip and colleagues conducted a systematic review and meta-analysis on task-based fMRI studies of ASD including motor, visual processing, executive function, auditory and language, basic social processing and complex social cognition tasks[20] They concluded that the most reliable finding was a disturbance to the function of social brain regions, whereas comparisons on other tasks were difficult due to the diversity and complexity of tasks used across studies. A meta-analysis of the resting-state abnormalities in subjects with ASD has yet to be performed
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