Systematic review and meta-analysis: multimodal functional and anatomical neural alterations in autism spectrum disorder.

This is a meta-analysis of group-level brain imaging; it cannot examine individual differences or track change over time in a single patient. The included studies used different diagnostic tools, imaging parameters, statistical thresholds, and correction methods, which the authors acknowledge may influence the pooled results. A significant proportion (74%) of the ASD participants had at least one co-occurring psychiatric condition, and the main analyses did not exclude them. The functional and structural meta-analyses drew on samples of different mean ages (about 11 years for functional, about 19 years for structural), so the two sets of findings are not directly comparable. The study cannot account for the influence of adverse childhood experiences, environmental exposures, or other non-genetic factors on the brain differences reported.

Funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China. No industry sponsor, no author declared a conflict of interest, and no company that sells a treatment for ASD is named anywhere in the paper.

Do not read these group-level brain imaging differences as a reason to target a specific brain region in therapy. The study compares average activity and volume between groups of people with and without ASD. It does not test whether changing activity in any one region improves a patient's communication, movement, or sensory processing, and the findings are averages that may not hold for any individual on your caseload.