1. Bell L, Wittkowski A, Hare DJ. {{Movement Disorders and Syndromic Autism: A Systematic Review}}. {J Autism Dev Disord}. 2018.
Movement disorders are reported in idiopathic autism but the extent to which comparable movement disorders are found in syndromic/co-morbid autism is unknown. A systematic search of Medline, Embase, PsychINFO and CINAHL on the prevalence of specific movement disorder in syndromic autism associated with specific genetic syndromes identified 16 papers, all relating to Angelman syndrome or Rett syndrome. Prevalence rates of 72.7-100% and 25.0-27.3% were reported for ataxia and tremor, respectively, in Angelman syndrome. In Rett syndrome, prevalence rates of 43.6-50% were reported for ataxia and 27.3-48.3% for tremor with additional reports of dystonia, rigidity and pyramidal signs. However, reliable assessment measures were rarely used and recruitment was often not described in sufficient detail.
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2. Chao OY, Yunger R, Yang YM. {{Behavioral assessments of BTBR T+Itpr3tf/J mice by tests of object attention and elevated open platform: Implications for an animal model of psychiatric comorbidity in autism}}. {Behav Brain Res}. 2018; 347: 140-7.
Autism spectrum disorders (ASD) are diagnosed based on the behavioral criteria of impaired social interaction, defective communication and repetitive behaviors. Psychiatric comorbidities, such as anxiety and intellectual disability, are commonly present in ASD. The BTBR T+ Itpr3tf/J (BTBR) mice display a range of autistic phenotypes, yet whether this mouse model is appropriate to study psychiatric comorbidity in ASD remains unclear. We addressed this issue by subjecting the BTBR animals to three-chambered apparatus, open field, object attention test and elevated open platform. Compared to C57BL/6J control mice, the BTBR mice displayed hyperactivity in most of the tests. In the three-chamber assessment, they exhibited deficits in sociability. In the open field, more grooming and thigmotaxis and less rearing behaviors were observed. They also showed impaired object-based attention. On the elevated open platform, the BTBR animals stayed more to the edges than in the center of the platform. To further examine the properties of this test, naive C57BL/6J mice were randomly administrated with saline or an anxiogenic substance, caffeine. The caffeine group demonstrated a similar behavioral pattern as the BTBR mice. When the saline group was re-exposed to the same platform, the time they stayed in the center substantially increased, likely due to reduced anxiety by habituation. These results indicate that the BTBR were more anxious than control mice on the open platform. Taken together, the BTBR strain exhibit emotional and cognitive impairments in addition to autistic behaviors, suggesting that they can be a valid model for ASD with psychiatric comorbidity.
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3. Fujino J, Tei S, Itahashi T, Aoki Y, Ohta H, Kanai C, Kubota M, Hashimoto RI, Nakamura M, Kato N, Takahashi H. {{Sunk Cost Effect in Individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder}}. {J Autism Dev Disord}. 2018.
The sunk cost effect, an interesting and well-known decision bias, is pervasive in real life and has been studied in various disciplines. In this study, we modified a task exemplifying the sunk cost effect and used it to evaluate this behavior in individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). The control group exhibited a typical sunk cost effect in our task. We found that the sunk cost effect was lower in the ASD group than in the control group. The results agree with previous evidence of reduced sensitivity to context stimuli in individuals with ASD and extend this finding to the context of the sunk cost effect. Our findings are useful in addressing the practical implications on their socioeconomic behavior.
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4. Harlalka V, Raju BS, Vinod PK, Roy D. {{Age, disease and their interaction effects on intrinsic connectivity of children and adolescents in Autism Spectrum Disorder using functional connectomics}}. {Brain Connect}. 2018.
Brain connectivity analysis has provided crucial insights to pinpoint the differences between autistic and typically developing (TD) children during development. The aim of this study is to investigate the functional connectomics of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) versus TD and underpin the effects of development, disease, and their interactions on the observed atypical brain connectivity patterns. Resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (rs-fMRI) from the Autism Brain Imaging Data Exchange (ABIDE) dataset, which is stratified into two cohorts: children (9-12 years) and adolescents (13-16 years), is used for the analysis. Differences in various graph-theoretical network measures are calculated between ASD and TD in each group. Further, two-factor ANOVA test is used, to study the effect of age, disease and their interaction on the network measures and the network edges. Further, the differences in connection strength between TD and ASD subjects are assessed using Network Based Statistics. The results showed that ASD exhibits increased functional integration at the expense of decreased functional segregation. In ASD adolescents, there is significant decrease in modularity suggesting a less robust modular organization and an increase in participation coefficient suggesting more random integration and widely distributed connection edges. Further, there is significant hypoconnectivity observed in the adolescent group especially in the Default Mode Network while the children group shows both hyper and hypoconnectivity. This study lends support to a model of global atypical connections and further identifies functional networks and areas that are independently affected by age, disease and their interaction.
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5. Keehn B, Westerfield M, Townsend J. {{Brief Report: Cross-Modal Capture: Preliminary Evidence of Inefficient Filtering in Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder}}. {J Autism Dev Disord}. 2018.
This study investigates how task-irrelevant auditory information is processed in children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Eighteen children with ASD and 19 age- and IQ-matched typically developing (TD) children were presented with semantically-congruent and incongruent picture-sound pairs, and in separate tasks were instructed to attend to only visual or both audio-visual sensory channels. Preliminary results showed that when required to attend to both modalities, both groups were equally slowed for semantically-incongruent compared to congruent pairs. However, when asked to attend to only visual information, children with ASD were disproportionally slowed by incongruent auditory information, suggesting that they may have more difficulty filtering task-irrelevant cross-modal information. Correlational analyses showed that this inefficient cross-modal attentional filtering was related to greater sociocommunicative impairment.
