Abstract
Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a lifelong neurodevelopmental condition that is accompanied by an atypical development of brain maturation. So far, brain development has mainly been studied during early childhood in ASD, and using measures of total or lobular brain volume. However, cortical volumetric measures are a product of two distinct biological neuroanatomical features, cortical thickness, and surface area, which most likely also have different neurodevelopmental trajectories in ASD. Here, we therefore examined age-related differences in cortical thickness and surface area in a cross-sectional sample of 77 male individuals with ASD ranging from 7 to 25 years of age, and 77 male neurotypical controls matched for age and FSIQ. Surface-based measures were analyzed using a general linear model (GLM) including linear, quadratic, and cubic age terms, as well as their interactions with the main effect of group. When controlling for the effects of age, individuals with ASD had spatially distributed reductions in cortical thickness relative to controls, particularly in fronto-temporal regions, and also showed significantly reduced surface area in the prefrontal cortex and the anterior temporal lobe. We also observed significant group × age interactions for both measures. However, while cortical thickness was best predicted by a quadratic age term, the neurodevelopmental trajectory for measures of surface area was mostly linear. Our findings suggest that ASD is accompanied by age-related and region-specific reductions in cortical thickness and surface area during childhood and early adulthood. Thus, differences in the neurodevelopmental trajectory of maturation for both measures need to be taken into account when interpreting between-group differences overall.
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Acknowledgments
This work was supported (1) by the Medical Research Council UK (G0400061 and G0800298), (2) by the Dr. Mortimer and Theresa Sackler Foundation, (3) by the EU-AIMS project (European Autism Interventions—a Multicentre Study for developing New Medications) receiving support from the Innovative Medicines Initiative Joint Undertaking under grant agreement no. 115300, which includes financial contributions from the EU Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013), (4) by the NIHR Biomedical Research Centre for Mental Health at King’s College London, Institute of Psychiatry, and (5) by the South London & Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust. We are also grateful to those who agreed to be scanned and who gave their time so generously to this study.
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C. Ecker and A. Shahidiani contributed equally to the manuscript.
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Ecker, C., Shahidiani, A., Feng, Y. et al. The effect of age, diagnosis, and their interaction on vertex-based measures of cortical thickness and surface area in autism spectrum disorder. J Neural Transm 121, 1157–1170 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00702-014-1207-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00702-014-1207-1