Tamaoki Yuko, Pasapula Varun, Chandler Collin, Borland Michael S, Olajubutu Olayinka I, Tharakan Liza S, Engineer Crystal T
The University of Texas at Dallas School of Behavioral and Brain Sciences.
Res Sq. 2023 Jul 31:rs.3.rs-3168097. doi: 10.21203/rs.3.rs-3168097/v1.
Individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) often exhibit altered sensory processing and deficits in language development. Prenatal exposure to valproic acid (VPA) increases the risk for ASD and impairs both receptive and expressive language. Like individuals with ASD, rodents prenatally exposed to VPA exhibit degraded auditory cortical processing and abnormal neural activity to sounds. Disrupted neuronal morphology has been documented in earlier processing areas of the auditory pathway in VPA-exposed rodents, but there are no studies documenting early auditory pathway physiology. Therefore, the objective of this study is to characterize inferior colliculus (IC) responses to different sounds in rats prenatally exposed to VPA compared to saline-exposed rats.
Neural recordings from the inferior colliculus were collected in response to tones, speech sounds, and noise burst trains.
Our results indicate that the overall response to speech sounds was degraded in VPA-exposed rats compared saline-exposed controls, but responses to tones and noise burst trains were unaltered.
These results are consistent with observations in individuals with autism that neural responses to complex sounds, like speech, are often altered, and lays the foundation for future studies of potential therapeutics to improve auditory processing in the VPA rat model of ASD.
自闭症谱系障碍（ASD）患者通常表现出感觉处理改变和语言发育缺陷。产前接触丙戊酸（VPA）会增加患ASD的风险，并损害接受性和表达性语言能力。与ASD患者一样，产前接触VPA的啮齿动物表现出听觉皮层处理能力下降以及对声音的神经活动异常。在产前接触VPA的啮齿动物的听觉通路早期处理区域已记录到神经元形态破坏，但尚无研究记录早期听觉通路生理学。因此，本研究的目的是比较产前接触VPA的大鼠与接触生理盐水的大鼠下丘（IC）对不同声音的反应特征。
收集下丘对纯音、语音和噪声脉冲序列的神经记录。
我们的结果表明，与接触生理盐水的对照组相比，产前接触VPA的大鼠对语音的总体反应下降，但对纯音和噪声脉冲序列的反应未改变。
这些结果与自闭症患者的观察结果一致，即对复杂声音（如语音）的神经反应通常会改变，并为未来研究改善ASD的VPA大鼠模型中听觉处理的潜在治疗方法奠定了基础。
