Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, Massachusetts General Hospital, Charlestown, MA, USA.
Department of Radiology, Harvard Medical School, Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, MA, USA.
J Autism Dev Disord. 2024 May;54(5):1947-1960. doi: 10.1007/s10803-023-05907-w. Epub 2023 Mar 17.
Auditory steady-state response (ASSR) has been studied as a potential biomarker for abnormal auditory sensory processing in autism spectrum disorder (ASD), with mixed results. Motivated by prior somatosensory findings of group differences in inter-trial coherence (ITC) between ASD and typically developing (TD) individuals at twice the steady-state stimulation frequency, we examined ASSR at 25 and 50 as well as 43 and 86 Hz in response to 25-Hz and 43-Hz auditory stimuli, respectively, using magnetoencephalography. Data were recorded from 22 ASD and 31 TD children, ages 6-17 years. ITC measures showed prominent ASSRs at the stimulation and double frequencies, without significant group differences. These results do not support ASSR as a robust ASD biomarker of abnormal auditory processing in ASD. Furthermore, the previously observed atypical double-frequency somatosensory response in ASD did not generalize to the auditory modality. Thus, the hypothesis about modality-independent abnormal local connectivity in ASD was not supported.
听觉稳态响应(ASSR)已被研究作为自闭症谱系障碍(ASD)中异常听觉感觉处理的潜在生物标志物,但其结果存在差异。受先前体感研究结果的启发,即 ASD 个体与典型发育(TD)个体之间在稳态刺激频率的两倍处的试验间相干性(ITC)存在组间差异,我们使用脑磁图检查了分别在 25 和 50 以及 43 和 86 Hz 下对 25-Hz 和 43-Hz 听觉刺激的 ASSR。数据来自 22 名 ASD 和 31 名 TD 儿童,年龄在 6-17 岁之间。ITC 测量结果表明,在刺激和双频处均存在明显的 ASSR,但组间无显著差异。这些结果不支持 ASSR 作为 ASD 中异常听觉处理的可靠生物标志物。此外,先前观察到的 ASD 中异常的双频体感反应并没有推广到听觉模式。因此,关于 ASD 中存在模态独立的异常局部连通性的假设没有得到支持。