School of Behavioral and Brain Sciences, The University of Texas at Dallas, 800 West Campbell Road BSB11, Richardson, TX, 75080, USA.
The University of Texas at Dallas, Texas Biomedical Device Center, 800 West Campbell Road BSB11, Richardson, TX, 75080, USA.
J Neurodev Disord. 2024 Jan 2;16(1):2. doi: 10.1186/s11689-023-09514-9.
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.
In vivo extracellular multiunit 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 to 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。产前暴露于丙戊酸（VPA）会增加 ASD 的风险，并损害接受性和表达性语言。与 ASD 患者一样，产前暴露于 VPA 的啮齿动物表现出听觉皮质处理受损和对声音的异常神经活动。已经在 VPA 暴露的啮齿动物的听觉通路早期处理区域记录到神经元形态破坏，但没有研究记录早期听觉通路生理学。因此，本研究的目的是描述与生理盐水暴露的大鼠相比，产前暴露于 VPA 的大鼠下丘脑中对不同声音的反应。
在活体条件下，从下丘脑中收集到的多单位记录对声音、语音和噪声突发序列做出反应。
我们的结果表明，与生理盐水暴露的对照组相比，VPA 暴露的大鼠对语音的整体反应降低，但对音调和声爆发序列的反应没有改变。
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）的神经反应常常发生改变，为未来研究潜在的治疗方法以改善 ASD 的 VPA 大鼠模型中的听觉处理奠定了基础。
