Autism and Cortical Thickness Deviation From Neurotypical Controls: Evidence for a Spatial Association With Serotonin Receptors.
Livio Tarchi, Arne Doose, Julius Hennig and 7 others
PMID 41923483WHAT IT FOUND
Parts of the cortex that were thicker in autistic people than in neurotypical controls were the parts with more serotonin receptors 5HT1a and 5HT4.
Dopamine and glutamate receptors showed no such match. No treatment was tested; this is scan data only.
Key findings
01The map of cortical thickness differences between autistic and neurotypical participants overlapped with the spatial density of two serotonin receptors, 5HT1a and 5HT4, and both correlations survived correction for multiple comparisons. Regions where autistic participants had thicker cortex were the regions with more of these receptors, and thinner regions had fewer.
02No significant spatial overlap was found between the cortical thickness differences and the density of dopamine or glutamate receptors.
03In 71 autistic participants from a single site, greater individual deviation from age-predicted cortical thickness in regions dense in 5HT1a or 5HT4 went with higher ADI social interaction and communication scores, and with higher ADOS communication and ADOS total scores for 5HT4.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they found
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What it does not show
The scans are cross-sectional, so the study cannot say whether one finding causes the other or which comes first. Scans came from 20 different sites and machines and were not harmonised. The authors ran checks with site effects controlled and the results held, but site differences remain a concern. The links between individual brain structure and ADOS/ADI scores were not corrected for multiple comparisons and the authors call them exploratory, needing replication in other samples. Those individual-level analyses used autistic participants from one site only (71 people), so they may not hold for others. The receptor density maps came from earlier PET studies with small samples of neurotypical adults, so they may not describe autistic brains. The dataset contains no measure of sensory responsiveness, so the study could not look at how sensory differences relate to these brain patterns. The control group included more females than the autistic group.
Declared interests
The work was funded by the Italian Ministry of University and Research under the National Recovery and Resilience Plan (MNESYS project) and by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) through the German Center for Child and Adolescent Health and the ASD-Net consortium. Funding included personnel costs. The authors state the funding agency had no influence on the research results and declare no conflicts of interest.
The easy way to misread this
Do not take this as evidence that serotonin, SSRIs or any drug changes autism. The study looked at brain scans that already existed and asked whether the pattern of cortical thickness differences overlapped with where certain receptors are dense. It tested no treatment, and the drug suggestions in the discussion are ideas for future research, not findings.
Summarised by AI from the full paper, without a clinician reviewing it. Check it against the source before it changes what you do. Read it on PubMed →