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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Child Adolesc. Psychiatry
Sec. Autism and Other Neurodevelopmental Disorders
Volume 3 - 2024 | doi: 10.3389/frcha.2024.1481957

Resting-state fMRI activation is associated with parent-reported phenotypic features of autism in early adolescence

Provisionally accepted
Robert Hickson Robert Hickson 1,2*Liberty Hebron Liberty Hebron 1Eva M. Muller-Oehring Eva M. Muller-Oehring 2,3Anastasia Cheu Anastasia Cheu 1Andres Hernandez Andres Hernandez 1,2Orsolya Kiss Orsolya Kiss 2Marie Gombert-Labedens Marie Gombert-Labedens 2Fiona C. Baker Fiona C. Baker 2Tilman Schulte Tilman Schulte 1,2*
  • 1 Palo Alto University, Palo Alto, United States
  • 2 SRI International, Menlo Park, California, United States
  • 3 School of Medicine, Stanford University, Stanford, California, United States

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is characterized by deficits in social cognition, self-referential processing, and restricted repetitive behaviors. Despite the established clinical symptoms and neurofunctional alterations in ASD, definitive biomarkers for ASD features during neurodevelopment remain unknown. In this study, we aimed to explore if activation in brain regions of the default mode network (DMN), specifically the medial prefrontal cortex (MPC), posterior cingulate cortex (PCC), superior temporal sulcus (STS), inferior frontal gyrus (IFG), angular gyrus (AG), and the temporoparietal junction (TPJ), during resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (rs-fMRI) is associated with possible phenotypic features of autism (PPFA) in a large, diverse youth cohort. We used cross-sectional parent-reported PPFA data and youth rs-fMRI brain data as part of the two-year follow-up of the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) study. Our sample consisted of 7,106 (53% male) adolescents aged 10-13.We conducted confirmatory factor analyses (CFAs) to establish the viability of our latent measurements: features of autism and regional brain activation. Structural regression analyses were used to investigate the associations between the six brain regions and the PPFA. We found that activation in the MPC (β = .16, p < .05) and the STS (β = .08, p < .05), and being male (β = .13, p < .05), was positively associated with PPFA. In contrast, activation in the IFG (β = -.08, p < .05) was negatively associated. Our findings suggest that regions of the "social brain" are associated with PPFA during early adolescence. Future research should characterize the developmental trajectory of social brain regions in relation to features of ASD, specifically brain regions known to mature relatively later during development.

    Keywords: rs-fMRI (Resting State fMRI), default mode network (DMN), Features of autism spectrum, preadolescence, Neuroactivation

    Received: 17 Aug 2024; Accepted: 21 Oct 2024.

    Copyright: © 2024 Hickson, Hebron, Muller-Oehring, Cheu, Hernandez, Kiss, Gombert-Labedens, Baker and Schulte. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence:
    Robert Hickson, Palo Alto University, Palo Alto, United States
    Tilman Schulte, Palo Alto University, Palo Alto, United States

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