Section on Cognitive Neuropsychology, Laboratory of Brain and Cognition, National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, MD 20892, USA.
Brain. 2012 Sep;135(Pt 9):2711-25. doi: 10.1093/brain/aws160. Epub 2012 Jul 11.
Autism spectrum disorders are developmental disorders characterized by impairments in social and communication abilities and repetitive behaviours. Converging neuroscientific evidence has suggested that the neuropathology of autism spectrum disorders is widely distributed, involving impaired connectivity throughout the brain. Here, we evaluate the hypothesis that decreased connectivity in high-functioning adolescents with an autism spectrum disorder relative to typically developing adolescents is concentrated within domain-specific circuits that are specialized for social processing. Using a novel whole-brain connectivity approach in functional magnetic resonance imaging, we found that not only are decreases in connectivity most pronounced between regions of the social brain but also they are selective to connections between limbic-related brain regions involved in affective aspects of social processing from other parts of the social brain that support language and sensorimotor processes. This selective pattern was independently obtained for correlations with measures of social symptom severity, implying a fractionation of the social brain in autism spectrum disorders at the level of whole circuits.
自闭症谱系障碍是一种发育障碍，其特征是社交和沟通能力受损以及重复行为。越来越多的神经科学证据表明，自闭症谱系障碍的神经病理学广泛分布，涉及大脑整体连接的受损。在这里，我们评估了这样一个假设，即与典型发育的青少年相比，高功能自闭症谱系障碍青少年的连接减少，主要集中在专门用于社交处理的特定领域的回路中。我们使用功能磁共振成像中的一种新的全脑连接方法发现，连接减少不仅在社交大脑区域之间最为明显，而且在社交大脑中涉及社交处理情感方面的边缘相关脑区域与支持语言和感觉运动过程的其他社交大脑区域之间的连接中也是选择性的。对于与社交症状严重程度的测量相关的相关性，这种选择性模式是独立获得的，这意味着自闭症谱系障碍中的社交大脑在整个回路水平上出现了分裂。
