Department of Psychiatry and Behavioural Neurosciences, Faculty of Health Sciences, McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada.
PLoS One. 2010 May 25;5(5):e10804. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0010804.
Current theoretical models of autism spectrum disorders (ASD) have proposed that impairments in the processing of social/emotional information may be linked to amygdala dysfunction. However, the extent to which amygdala functions are compromised in ASD has become a topic of debate in recent years. In a jittered functional magnetic resonance imaging study, sub-threshold presentations of anxious faces permitted an examination of amygdala recruitment in 12 high functioning adult males with ASD and 12 matched controls. We found heightened neural activation of the amygdala in both high functioning adults with ASD and matched controls. Neither the intensity nor the time-course of amygdala activation differed between the groups. However, the adults with ASD showed significantly lower levels of fusiform activation during the trials compared to controls. Our findings suggest that in ASD, the transmission of socially salient information along sub-cortical pathways is intact: and yet the signaling of this information to structures downstream may be impoverished, and the pathways that facilitate subsequent processing deficient.
目前，自闭症谱系障碍（ASD）的理论模型提出，社交/情感信息处理方面的障碍可能与杏仁核功能障碍有关。然而，近年来，ASD 患者的杏仁核功能受损程度已成为争议的话题。在一项随机功能磁共振成像研究中，通过阈下呈现焦虑面孔，我们检查了 12 名高功能成年 ASD 男性和 12 名匹配对照者的杏仁核招募情况。我们发现，在高功能 ASD 成年患者和匹配对照者中，杏仁核的神经激活都增强了。两组之间杏仁核激活的强度和时程均无差异。然而，与对照组相比，ASD 患者在试验期间梭状回的激活水平明显降低。我们的研究结果表明，在 ASD 中，沿着皮质下通路传递社交相关信息是完整的：然而，将这些信息传递到下游结构的信号可能会减少，并且促进后续处理的通路可能会不足。
