TY  - JOUR
AU  - Benkarim, Oualid
AU  - Paquola, Casey
AU  - Park, Bo-yong
AU  - Hong, Seok-Jun
AU  - Royer, Jessica
AU  - Vos de Wael, Reinder
AU  - Lariviere, Sara
AU  - Valk, Sofie
AU  - Bzdok, Danilo
AU  - Mottron, Laurent
AU  - C. Bernhardt, Boris
TI  - Connectivity alterations in autism reflect functional idiosyncrasy
JO  - Communications biology
VL  - 4
IS  - 1
SN  - 2399-3642
CY  - London
PB  - Springer Nature
M1  - FZJ-2021-05970
SP  - 1078
PY  - 2021
AB  - Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is commonly understood as an alteration of brain networks, yet case-control analyses against typically-developing controls (TD) have yielded inconsistent results. Here, we devised a novel approach to profile the inter-individual variability in functional network organization and tested whether such idiosyncrasy contributes to connectivity alterations in ASD. Studying a multi-centric dataset with 157 ASD and 172 TD, we obtained robust evidence for increased idiosyncrasy in ASD relative to TD in default mode, somatomotor and attention networks, but also reduced idiosyncrasy in lateral temporal cortices. Idiosyncrasy increased with age and significantly correlated with symptom severity in ASD. Furthermore, while patterns of functional idiosyncrasy were not correlated with ASD-related cortical thickness alterations, they co-localized with the expression patterns of ASD risk genes. Notably, we could demonstrate that patterns of atypical idiosyncrasy in ASD closely overlapped with connectivity alterations that are measurable with conventional case-control designs and may, thus, be a principal driver of inconsistency in the autism connectomics literature. These findings support important interactions between inter-individual heterogeneity in autism and functional signatures. Our findings provide novel biomarkers to study atypical brain development and may consolidate prior research findings on the variable nature of connectome level anomalies in autism.
LB  - PUB:(DE-HGF)16
C6  - pmid:34526654
UR  - <Go to ISI:>//WOS:000696239600004
DO  - DOI:10.1038/s42003-021-02572-6
UR  - https://juser.fz-juelich.de/record/904400
ER  -