1. Ehlen F, Roepke S, Klostermann F, Baskow I, Geise P, Belica C, Tiedt HO, Behnia B. {{Small Semantic Networks in Individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder Without Intellectual Impairment: A Verbal Fluency Approach}}. {J Autism Dev Disord}. 2020.
Individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) experience a variety of symptoms sometimes including atypicalities in language use. The study explored differences in semantic network organisation of adults with ASD without intellectual impairment. We assessed clusters and switches in verbal fluency tasks (‘animals’, ‘human feature’, ‘verbs’, ‘r-words’) via curve fitting in combination with corpus-driven analysis of semantic relatedness and evaluated socio-emotional and motor action related content. Compared to participants without ASD (n = 39), participants with ASD (n = 32) tended to produce smaller clusters, longer switches, and fewer words in semantic conditions (no p values survived Bonferroni-correction), whereas relatedness and content were similar. In ASD, semantic networks underlying cluster formation appeared comparably small without affecting strength of associations or content.
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2. Holden R, Mueller J, McGowan J, Sanyal J, Kikoler M, Simonoff E, Velupillai S, Downs J. {{Investigating Bullying as a Predictor of Suicidality in a Clinical Sample of Adolescents with Autism Spectrum Disorder}}. {Autism Res}. 2020.
For typically developing adolescents, being bullied is associated with increased risk of suicidality. Although adolescents with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are at increased risk of both bullying and suicidality, there is very little research that examines the extent to which an experience of being bullied may increase suicidality within this specific population. To address this, we conducted a retrospective cohort study to investigate the longitudinal association between experiencing bullying and suicidality in a clinical population of 680 adolescents with ASD. Electronic health records of adolescents (13-17 years), using mental health services in South London, with a diagnosis of ASD were analyzed. Natural language processing was employed to identify mentions of bullying and suicidality in the free text fields of adolescents’ clinical records. Cox regression analysis was employed to investigate the longitudinal relationship between bullying and suicidality outcomes. Reported experience of bullying in the first month of clinical contact was associated with an increased risk suicidality over the follow-up period (hazard ratio = 1.82; 95% confidence interval = 1.28-2.59). In addition, female gender, psychosis, affective disorder diagnoses, and higher intellectual ability were all associated with suicidality at follow-up. This study is the first to demonstrate the strength of longitudinal associations between bullying and suicidality in a clinical population of adolescents with ASD, using automated approaches to detect key life events within clinical records. Our findings provide support for identifying and dealing with bullying in schools, and for antibullying strategy’s incorporation into wider suicide prevention programs for young people with ASD. Autism Res 2020. (c) 2020 International Society for Autism Research, Wiley Periodicals, Inc. LAY SUMMARY: We investigated the relationship between bullying and suicidality in young people with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). We examined the clinical records of adolescents (aged 13-18 years old) with ASD in South London who were receiving treatment from Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services. We found that if they reported being bullied in the first month after they were first seen by mental health services, they were nearly twice as likely to go on to develop suicidal thoughts or behaviors.
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3. Tatavarty V, Torrado Pacheco A, Groves Kuhnle C, Lin H, Koundinya P, Miska NJ, Hengen KB, Wagner FF, Van Hooser SD, Turrigiano GG. {{Autism-Associated Shank3 Is Essential for Homeostatic Compensation in Rodent V1}}. {Neuron}. 2020.
Mutations in Shank3 are strongly associated with autism spectrum disorders and neural circuit changes in several brain areas, but the cellular mechanisms that underlie these defects are not understood. Homeostatic forms of plasticity allow central circuits to maintain stable function during experience-dependent development, leading us to ask whether loss of Shank3 might impair homeostatic plasticity and circuit-level compensation to perturbations. We found that Shank3 loss in vitro abolished synaptic scaling and intrinsic homeostatic plasticity, deficits that could be rescued by treatment with lithium. Further, Shank3 knockout severely compromised the in vivo ability of visual cortical circuits to recover from perturbations to sensory drive. Finally, lithium treatment ameliorated a repetitive self-grooming phenotype in Shank3 knockout mice. These findings demonstrate that Shank3 loss severely impairs the ability of central circuits to harness homeostatic mechanisms to compensate for perturbations in drive, which, in turn, may render them more vulnerable to such perturbations.
