Defining clusters of young autistic and typically developing children based on loudness-dependent auditory electrophysiological responses.
Patrick Dwyer, Xiaodong Wang, Rosanna De Meo-Monteil and 3 others
PMID 32539866WHAT IT FOUND
Brain responses to sound loudness clustered 213 children into four groups.
Autistic children with hyper-responsive brains to loud sounds had more caregiver-reported distractibility. However, clusters overlapped heavily with typically developing peers, so neural patterns do not clearly separate diagnoses.
Key findings
01Autistic children in the cluster with the strongest brain responses to loud sounds were reported by caregivers to have significantly more auditory distractibility than those in the cluster with the weakest responses to loud sounds.
02Clusters defined by neural response patterns contained substantial numbers of both autistic and typically developing children, showing that these brain patterns are not specific to autism.
03Continuous analysis showed that autistic children with weak brain responses to soft sounds and strong responses to loud sounds were rated by caregivers as having more auditory distractibility problems.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for OTsWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
The study is cross-sectional and exploratory, so it cannot prove that neural hyper-responsiveness causes distractibility. Hearing acuity was not measured, so it is unclear if differences in brain responses were due to hearing thresholds. The caregiver questionnaire (Short Sensory Profile) was not originally designed for autism, and the 'auditory distractibility' subscale may measure noise intolerance rather than attention problems. Clusters were not perfectly replicable; some children moved between clusters when the analysis was repeated on smaller groups.
Declared interests
Funded by the MIND Institute, NIH, NIMH, NICHD, and the Swiss National Science Foundation. No specific conflicts of interest regarding commercial entities were declared.
The easy way to misread this
Do not interpret the neural clusters as diagnostic markers for autism. The study found substantial overlap between autistic and typically developing children in every cluster, meaning these brain response patterns are not specific to autism.