Hierarchical cortical transcriptome disorganization in autism.
Michael V Lombardo, Eric Courchesne, Nathan E Lewis and 1 others
PMID 28649314WHAT IT FOUND
Postmortem autism brain tissue showed coordinated changes in gene activity across immune, protein-production, and synaptic systems.
This molecular finding does not change PT, OT, or SLP treatment.
Key findings
01Ten of the 27 gene modules showed reproducible differences between autism and control tissue, with 5 higher in autism and 5 lower.
02The higher modules included immune/inflammation and translation-related processes, while lower modules included synaptic processes.
03Protein products of dysregulated modules showed many direct interactions, and dysregulated modules had more such interactions than non-dysregulated modules.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they found
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What it does not show
Findings come from postmortem brain tissue, not living patients, and do not measure speech, movement, cognition, or therapy outcomes. The datasets included 86 unique individuals and 162 tissue samples, with 19 individuals overlapping between datasets. The datasets used different tissue platforms, brain regions, ages, and sexes, and network organization was not preserved across datasets. The work is molecular and does not test any intervention or clinical decision.
Declared interests
The supplied article metadata lists non-U.S. government and NIH extramural research support; no explicit conflict-of-interest declaration is included in the text.
The easy way to misread this
Do not read this as evidence that a therapy should be changed or that these pathways can be targeted clinically. It reports molecular differences in postmortem cortical tissue from a small number of donors, not effects on living patients or rehabilitation outcomes.