Exploring atypical spatial-functional coupling in adolescent autism spectrum disorder: insights from neurodevelopment and transcriptomic architecture

Description

Jun Pan, Heng Zhang, Yiran Zhai, Jiang Zhang, and Hanbin Deng study how brain activity patterns sit in space in teenagers with autism. Their 2026 study scans 162 autistic and 175 non autistic adolescents aged 12 to 18 at rest. Two measures grade the maps: one for how patchy activity is across space, and one for how steady that pattern stays.

The patchiness measure ran higher in autism within higher order networks, including a left language network and a right multimodal one. The steadiness measure showed no group gap after strict correction. Within the autism group, more patchiness tracked worse social and emotional symptoms, yet not repetitive behavior. Gene maps of the cortex lined up with the patchy regions, pointing to synaptic signaling, energy production, and support cell functions. The authors frame the result as a space based view of autism brain organization.

Catalog record

Source: https://europepmc.org/article/MED/PMC13454100