Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry
New researchWhite Matter Compromise of Callosal and Subcortical Fiber Tracts in Children With Autism Spectrum Disorder: A Diffusion Tensor Imaging Study
Section snippets
Participants
A total of 26 children with ASD (24 male and two female) and 24 TD children (23 male and one female), matched for age and nonverbal IQ were included (Table 1 and Table S1, available online). The ASD group consisted of 15 children with autistic disorder and 11 children with Asperger's disorder. Clinical diagnoses were made by an expert clinical psychologist (A.J.L.) using the Autism Diagnostic Interview–Revised (ADI-R)36 and the Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule (ADOS).37 Children with
Results
For whole-brain white matter, FA was significantly decreased (p = .004), whereas MD and radial diffusion were significantly increased (p = .01 and .007, respectively) in the ASD group compared with the TD group. The group difference in axial diffusion did not reach significance (p = .22; Figure 2).
Pearson correlation analysis was performed to detect possible effects of age and IQ on the DTI indices. Age was negatively correlated with MD of the posterior limb of the internal capsule in both the
Discussion
Our findings add to the evidence of widespread white matter compromise in ASD, as first suggested by preliminary observations in a small-sample study by Barnea-Goraly et al.9 We observed reduced FA and increased MD and radial diffusion for whole-brain white matter in our cohort of children and adolescents with ASD, indicating loss of directional coherence of fiber bundles, reduced fiber density, and impaired myelination or axonal integrity.45, 46 In each of our ROIs, mean differences in the
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This study was supported by National Institutes of Health grants R01-DC006155 and R01-MH081023, with additional funding from NIDCD1T32 DC007361-03 (B.K.).
The authors express special thanks to the children and families who participated.
Disclosure: Drs. Shukla, Müller, and Lincoln, and Mr. Keehn report no biomedical financial interests or potential conflicts of interest.
Supplemental material cited in this article is available online.