Atypical Brain Structures as a Function of Gray Matter Volume (GMV) and Gray Matter Density (GMD) in Young Adults Relating to Autism Spectrum Traits

Abstract

Individuals with autistic traits are those who present in the normal population with characteristics of social, communication, personality, and cognitive impairments but do not meet the clinical threshold for autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Most studies have focused on the abnormalities in ASD patients rather than on individuals with autistic traits. In this study, we focused on the behaviors of a large sample (N = 401) of Chinese individuals with different levels of autistic traits, measured using the Autism Spectrum Quotient, and applied voxel-based morphometry (VBM) to determine their association to differences in brain structure. The results mainly showed that the correlation between gray matter volume (GMV) and gray matter density of the brain and the Autism Spectrum Quotient was significant in these regions: the right middle frontal gyrus, which are involved in social processing and social reasoning; the left parahippocampal gyrus, which is involved in socioemotional behaviors and unconscious relational memory encoding; and the right superior parietal lobule, which are involved in cognitive control and the ability to show attention to detail. These findings reveal that people with autistic traits in the normal population have atypical development in GMV and gray matter density, which may affect their social functioning and communication ability.

Association between somatosensory sensitivity and regional gray matter volume in healthy young volunteers: a voxel-based morphometry study

“…2020 ; Lukito et al. 2020 ; Yaxu et al. 2020 ), and this has been attributed to brain overgrowth ( Kobayashi et al.…”

Brain Structural Changes During Juvenile Fibromyalgia: Relationships With Pain, Fatigue, and Functional Disability

“…Spatially normalized tissue maps were modulated by the Jacobian determinants from the corresponding flow fields to restore the volumetric information lost during the high‐dimensional spatial registration. This modulation step multiplies each voxel by the relative change in volume, which allows for a comparison of absolute GMV corrected for individual brain size (30). Only normalized and modulated images were transformed to a standard Montreal Neurological Institute (MNI) template and resliced to 1.5 mm.…”

Internal reliability, homogeneity, and factor structure of the ten-item Autism-Spectrum Quotient (AQ-10) with two additional response categories

“…The autism-spectrum quotient (AQ; Baron-Cohen et al, 2001) is a questionnaire used as a screening tool for autism in psychiatric and psychological diagnostics (Huang et al, 2020;Woodbury-Smith et al, 2005). It is also applied in research to measure autistic traits in the general population (e.g., Lewton et al, 2019;Lin et al, 2020;Yaxu et al, 2020). In particular, its ten-item short form (AQ-10; Allison et al, 2012) can be an efficient measure for research purposes (e.g., Bertrams & Schlegel, 2020;Gollwitzer et al, 2019;Lundin et al, 2019).…”