The effect of age, diagnosis, and their interaction on vertex-based measures of cortical thickness and surface area in autism spectrum disorder

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a lifelong neurodevelopmental condition that is accompanied by an atypical development of brain maturation. So far, brain development has mainly been studied during early childhood in ASD, and using measures of total or lobular brain volume. However, cortical volume...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:	Journal of Neural Transmission Vol. 121; no. 9; pp. 1157 - 1170
Main Authors:	Ecker, C., Shahidiani, A., Feng, Y., Daly, E., Murphy, C., D’Almeida, V., Deoni, S., Williams, S. C., Gillan, N., Gudbrandsen, M., Wichers, R., Andrews, D., Van Hemert, L., Murphy, D. G. M.
Format:	Journal Article
Language:	English
Published:	Vienna Springer Vienna 01-09-2014 Springer Nature B.V
Subjects:	Adolescent Adult Aging Cerebral Cortex - growth & development Cerebral Cortex - pathology Child Child Development Disorders, Pervasive - pathology Cross-Sectional Studies Humans Image Processing, Computer-Assisted Male Medicine Medicine & Public Health Neurology Neuropsychological Tests Neurosciences Organ Size Psychiatry Psychiatry and Preclinical Psychiatric Studies - Original Article Young Adult Neurodevelopment Autism Cortical thickness Surface area Neuroanatomy
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Summary:	Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a lifelong neurodevelopmental condition that is accompanied by an atypical development of brain maturation. So far, brain development has mainly been studied during early childhood in ASD, and using measures of total or lobular brain volume. However, cortical volumetric measures are a product of two distinct biological neuroanatomical features, cortical thickness, and surface area, which most likely also have different neurodevelopmental trajectories in ASD. Here, we therefore examined age-related differences in cortical thickness and surface area in a cross-sectional sample of 77 male individuals with ASD ranging from 7 to 25 years of age, and 77 male neurotypical controls matched for age and FSIQ. Surface-based measures were analyzed using a general linear model (GLM) including linear, quadratic, and cubic age terms, as well as their interactions with the main effect of group. When controlling for the effects of age, individuals with ASD had spatially distributed reductions in cortical thickness relative to controls, particularly in fronto-temporal regions, and also showed significantly reduced surface area in the prefrontal cortex and the anterior temporal lobe. We also observed significant group × age interactions for both measures. However, while cortical thickness was best predicted by a quadratic age term, the neurodevelopmental trajectory for measures of surface area was mostly linear. Our findings suggest that ASD is accompanied by age-related and region-specific reductions in cortical thickness and surface area during childhood and early adulthood. Thus, differences in the neurodevelopmental trajectory of maturation for both measures need to be taken into account when interpreting between-group differences overall.
Bibliography:	ObjectType-Article-2 SourceType-Scholarly Journals-1 ObjectType-Feature-1 content type line 23
ISSN:	0300-9564 1435-1463
DOI:	10.1007/s00702-014-1207-1