What is the Core Symptom and Neural Mechanism of Asperger Syndrome? From Our Ten Years of Clinical Observation of Adults with Autism Spectrum Disorder

Abstract

In 2008, we launched a new outpatient clinic and day care service designed exclusively for adults with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Since then, more than 6000 people visited our facility. We have also launched the Medical Institute for Developmental Disabilities Research (MIDDR) at Showa University, where neuroimaging studies with a 3.0 Tesla MRI scanner and rehabilitation studies intended to support people with ASD for job seeking were conducted for the past five years. As our subjects were found to have normal or high intelligence, we present here our research studies on Asperger syndrome patients with the focus on their resting-state functional connectivity network. We also review hypotheses of brain functioning in Asperger syndrome.