Shank3-deficient rats exhibit degraded cortical responses to sound.
Crystal T Engineer, Kimiya C Rahebi, Michael S Borland and 8 others
PMID 29052348WHAT IT FOUND
Shank3 heterozygous rats had weaker cortical responses to tones, rapid noise bursts, and speech onsets.
The first response to speech sounds was slower overall. Ability to tell isolated speech sounds apart was unchanged. No therapy was tested.
Key findings
01Tone-evoked cortical responses were weaker in Shank3 heterozygous rats than in control rats.
02Responses to the second burst in noise-burst trains were weaker in AAF, A1, and PAF.
03Speech onset responses were weaker and slower overall, but neural classifier accuracy for consonant pairs was not impaired.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
The study was done in rats, not people with Phelan-McDermid syndrome, so it does not show how these findings translate to patients. Only eight heterozygous Shank3 rats and eleven control rats were recorded, so the group sizes are small. Rats were anesthetized during recording, so the results may not match how auditory cortex works in an awake animal. The main outcomes were neural response measures, not speech, language, or therapy outcomes. The classifier finding shows that isolated speech discrimination was not impaired, so the paper does not demonstrate a speech-specific deficit. The suggestion that rapid speech streams may be impaired is a prediction from noise-burst results, not a behavioral speech test in these rats.
Declared interests
The supplied text lists NIH, non-U.S. government, and non-PHS U.S. government research support, but does not provide an author conflicts-of-interest statement.
The easy way to misread this
Do not conclude that people with Phelan-McDermid syndrome have degraded cortical responses to speech or that any therapy will help. The study measured anesthetized rats, and neural discrimination of isolated speech sounds was not impaired.