The following is a summary of “Resting-State Functional Connectivity of the Amygdala in Autism: A Preregistered Large-Scale Study,” published in the August 2024 issue of Psychiatry by Kliemann et al.
Past investigation on Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) has suggested 3 neurobiological hypotheses: reduced connectivity between brain regions, atypical amygdala function, and significant variability in brain function in people with ASD.
Researchers conducted a retrospective study to address the limitations, such as small sample sizes, unquantified data quality, and analytic flexibility, by testing the 3 hypotheses involving amygdala functional connectivity in ASD.
They tested 3 hypotheses using a subset of the Autism Brain Imaging Data Exchange datasets, which included 488 participants after exclusions, with 212 diagnosed with ASD. They examined resting-state functional connectivity (FC) from functional MRI data on two anatomically defined amygdala subdivisions. These addressed the hypotheses regarding magnitude, pattern similarity, and connectivity variability across various anatomical scales, ranging from the whole brain to specific regions and networks.
The results showed a Bayesian approach to the hypothesis; evaluation indicated varying evidence for atypical amygdala FC magnitude in ASD, strong evidence of a multivariate pattern of FC was typical, and no consistent evidence of increased interindividual variability in FC.
They concluded that there was no reliable evidence for atypical functional connectivity of autism, contrary to hypotheses.
Source: psychiatryonline.org/doi/10.1176/appi.ajp.20230249
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