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Intrinsic excitation-inhibition imbalance affects medial prefrontal cortex differently in autistic men versus women.
Journal article

Intrinsic excitation-inhibition imbalance affects medial prefrontal cortex differently in autistic men versus women.

  • Trakoshis S Laboratory for Autism and Neurodevelopmental Disorders, Center for Neuroscience and Cognitive Systems @UniTn, Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia, Rovereto, Italy.
  • Martínez-Cañada P Neural Computation Laboratory, Center for Neuroscience and Cognitive Systems @UniTn, Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia, Rovereto, Italy.
  • Rocchi F Functional Neuroimaging Laboratory, Center for Neuroscience and Cognitive Systems @UniTn, Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia, Rovereto, Italy.
  • Canella C Functional Neuroimaging Laboratory, Center for Neuroscience and Cognitive Systems @UniTn, Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia, Rovereto, Italy.
  • You W Artificial Intelligence and Image Processing Laboratory, Department of Information and Communications Engineering, Sun Moon University, Asan, Republic of Korea.
  • Chakrabarti B Autism Research Centre, Department of Psychiatry, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, United Kingdom.
  • Ruigrok AN Autism Research Centre, Department of Psychiatry, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, United Kingdom.
  • Bullmore ET Cambridgeshire and Peterborough National Health Service Foundation Trust, Cambridge, United Kingdom.
  • Suckling J Brain Mapping Unit, Department of Psychiatry, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, United Kingdom.
  • Markicevic M Neural Control of Movement Lab, D-HEST, ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland.
  • Zerbi V Neural Control of Movement Lab, D-HEST, ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland.
  • Baron-Cohen S Functional Neuroimaging Laboratory, Center for Neuroscience and Cognitive Systems @UniTn, Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia, Rovereto, Italy.
  • Gozzi A Autism Research Centre, Department of Psychiatry, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, United Kingdom.
  • Lai MC Neural Computation Laboratory, Center for Neuroscience and Cognitive Systems @UniTn, Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia, Rovereto, Italy.
  • Panzeri S Laboratory for Autism and Neurodevelopmental Disorders, Center for Neuroscience and Cognitive Systems @UniTn, Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia, Rovereto, Italy.
  • Lombardo MV
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  • 2020-08-05
Published in:
  • eLife. - 2020
autism
excitation
fMRI
heterogeneity
human
human biology
inhibition
medicine
mouse
neuroscience
sex/gender
English Excitation-inhibition (E:I) imbalance is theorized as an important pathophysiological mechanism in autism. Autism affects males more frequently than females and sex-related mechanisms (e.g., X-linked genes, androgen hormones) can influence E:I balance. This suggests that E:I imbalance may affect autism differently in males versus females. With a combination of in-silico modeling and in-vivo chemogenetic manipulations in mice, we first show that a time-series metric estimated from fMRI BOLD signal, the Hurst exponent (H), can be an index for underlying change in the synaptic E:I ratio. In autism we find that H is reduced, indicating increased excitation, in the medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC) of autistic males but not females. Increasingly intact MPFC H is also associated with heightened ability to behaviorally camouflage social-communicative difficulties, but only in autistic females. This work suggests that H in BOLD can index synaptic E:I ratio and that E:I imbalance affects autistic males and females differently.
Language
  • English
Open access status
gold
Identifiers
Persistent URL
https://folia.unifr.ch/global/documents/119260
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