Department of Psychology, Yunnan Normal University, Kunming, Yunnan Province, PR China; Zhejiang Key Laboratory for Research in Assessment of Cognitive Impairments, Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province, PR China.
Department of Psychology, Yunnan Normal University, Kunming, Yunnan Province, PR China.
J Affect Disord. 2023 Sep 1;336:74-80. doi: 10.1016/j.jad.2023.05.025. Epub 2023 May 16.
Neuroscientific evidence suggests that the pathological symptoms associated with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) are not confined to a single brain region but involve networks of the brain on a larger spatial scale. Analyzing diagrams of edge-edge interactions could provide important perspectives on the organization and function of complex systems.
Resting-state fMRI data from 238 ASD patients and 311 healthy controls (HCs) were included in the current study. We used the thalamus as the mediating node to calculate the edge functional connectivity (eFC) of the brain network and compared the ASD subjects and HCs.
Compared with the HCs, the ASD subjects exhibited abnormalities in the central node thalamus and four brain regions (amygdala, nucleus accumbens, pallidum and hippocampus), as well as in the eFC formed by the inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) (or middle temporal gyrus (MTG)). In addition, ASD subjects showed variable characteristics of the eFC between nodes in different networks.
The changes in these brain regions may be due to the disturbance in the reward system, which leads to coherence in the instantaneous comovement of the functional connections formed by these brain regions in ASD. This notion also reveals a functional network feature between the cortical and subcortical regions in ASD.
神经科学证据表明，与自闭症谱系障碍（ASD）相关的病理症状不仅局限于单个脑区，而是涉及更大空间尺度上的脑网络。分析边缘-边缘相互作用的图谱可以为复杂系统的组织和功能提供重要视角。
本研究纳入了 238 名 ASD 患者和 311 名健康对照（HC）的静息态 fMRI 数据。我们以丘脑为中介节点来计算脑网络的边缘功能连接（eFC），并比较了 ASD 患者和 HCs 的差异。
与 HCs 相比，ASD 患者的丘脑中央节点以及四个脑区（杏仁核、伏隔核、苍白球和海马体）以及由额下回（IFG）（或颞中回（MTG））形成的 eFC 存在异常。此外，ASD 患者在不同网络中节点之间的 eFC 表现出不同的特征。
这些脑区的变化可能是由于奖励系统的紊乱导致的，这使得这些脑区之间形成的功能连接的瞬时协同在 ASD 中具有一致性。这一观点也揭示了 ASD 中皮质和皮质下区域之间的功能网络特征。
