Brain Hyperconnectivity in Children with Autism and its Links to Social Deficits

Abstract

Summary Autism spectrum disorder (ASD), a neurodevelopmental disorder affecting nearly 1 in 88 children, is thought to result from aberrant brain connectivity. Remarkably, there have been no systematic attempts to characterize whole-brain connectivity in children with ASD. Here, we use neuroimaging to show there are more instances of greater functional connectivity in the brains of children with ASD compared with typically developing children. Hyper-connectivity in ASD was observed at the whole-brain and subsystems level, across long- and short-range connections, and was associated with higher levels of fluctuations in regional brain signals. Brain hyper-connectivity predicted symptom severity in ASD such that children with greater functional connectivity exhibited more severe social deficits. We replicated these findings in two additional independent cohorts, demonstrating again that at earlier ages, the brain in ASD is largely functionally hyper-connected in ways that contribute to social dysfunction. Our findings provide novel insights into brain mechanisms underlying childhood autism.

Resting-state functional connectivity predicts longitudinal change in autistic traits and adaptive functioning in autism

“…The predictive power of the fMRI measures was comparable with that of time 1 behavioral measures (68% accuracy, 69% AUC), and combining the two modalities provided the best predictive power (80% accuracy, 81% AUC). Another study also reported significantly predicting ASD symptom severity using rs-fcMRI, but they did not report the amount of variance explained by their models (43). Previous studies with other populations, including individuals with depression (26), dyslexia (27), alcoholism (28), and academic difficulties (29,30), have further shown that brainbased features can add additional predictive power to behavioral measures.…”

Epilepsy and Autism

“…Reports have been published revealing reduced long-range, distant brain connectivity during both task-specific (Besag 2004;Koshino et al 2005Koshino et al , 2008Kana et al 2006;Just et al 2007) and restingstate paradigms Weng et al 2010). Likewise, a number of studies have shown reduced short-range, local connectivity (Besag 2004;Koshino et al 2005Koshino et al , 2008Just et al 2007;Kana et al 2011). Results from yet other studies have shown increased connectivity, both long range (Ben Bashat et al 2007;Cheng et al 2010;Supekar et al 2013) and short range (Weng et al 2010;Anderson et al 2011;Keown et al 2013;Khan et al 2013;Lewis et al 2013). …”

Brain dynamics in ASD during movie‐watching show idiosyncratic functional integration and segregation

“…Accordingly, coordinated processing between separate brain regions, known as functional connectivity (FC), that is, typically quantified by correlational measures of statistical interdependency (Friston, 1994), has been assessed in resting‐state (Di Martino et al, 2014; Gotts et al, 2012; Supekar et al, 2013) and in a variety of tasks probing speech comprehension (Just, Cherkassky, Keller, & Minshew, 2004), visuomotor performance (Mizuno, Villalobos, Davies, Dahl, & Müller, 2006; Turner, Frost, Linsenbardt, McIlroy, & Müller, 2006; Villalobos, Mizuno, Dahl, Kemmotsu, & Müller, 2005), visuospatial abilities (Damarla et al, 2010; Liu, Cherkassky, Minshew, & Just, 2011), face processing (Kleinhans et al, 2008; Rudie et al, 2012), or executive functions (Just, Cherkassky, Keller, Kana, & Minshew, 2007; Kana, Keller, Minshew, & Just, 2007; Koshino et al, 2008). The big picture emerging from those reports is lowered FC between frontal and posterior brain regions (see Vissers, Cohen, & Geurts, 2012 for a review), as formulated in the underconnectivity theory of autism (Just, Keller, Malave, Kana, & Varma, 2012).…”