Dissecting the heterogeneous subcortical brain volume of autism spectrum disorder using community detection.
Ting Li, Martine Hoogman, Nina Roth Mota and 4 others
PMID 34704385WHAT IT FOUND
Brain structure in autism does not split into distinct subtypes.
Instead, people with and without autism fall into the same four groups based on subcortical volume patterns. These groups, not the diagnosis itself, explain most variation in brain size.
Key findings
01Community detection identified four distinct subgroups in boys, and three in adolescents and adults, based on subcortical brain volumes.
02The distribution of participants with autism and healthy controls across these brain-based communities did not differ significantly in any age group.
03Brain-based communities accounted for significantly more variance in subcortical volumes than the diagnosis of autism itself.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they found
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What it does not show
The study only analyzed male participants, so findings may not apply to females with autism. Inclusion and exclusion criteria were not unified across the many contributing sites. Clinical data was incomplete: ADOS scores were available for only 43.8% of boys, and comorbidity data for only 11.3%. The community detection algorithm involves arbitrary thresholds, and other classification methods might yield different subgroups. The study is cross-sectional, so it cannot determine if brain structure changes over time within these communities.
Declared interests
Several authors have received consulting fees, honoraria, or research support from pharmaceutical companies including Roche, Takeda, Janssen-Cilag, Lundbeck, and Eli Lilly. Dr. Rubia received funding from Takeda for another project. No single company funded or wrote this specific study.
The easy way to misread this
Do not interpret the brain-based communities as distinct subtypes of autism. The study found that individuals with and without autism are distributed similarly across these communities, meaning these patterns reflect general neuroanatomical variation rather than a specific 'autism brain type'.