Pediatric neurology
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Pediatric neurology · Oct 2015
Structural Gray Matter Differences During Childhood Development in Autism Spectrum Disorder: A Multimetric Approach.
Autism spectrum disorder is a complex neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by impaired social interaction and communication, repetitive behaviors, and restricted interests. Gray matter differences linked to autism spectrum disorder have been studied using a variety of structural imaging methods, but yielded little consensus; the extent to which disparate results reflect differences in methodology or heterogeneity within autism spectrum disorder is not yet clear. Moreover, very few studies have examined gray matter changes as a function of age in autism spectrum disorder. ⋯ The results underline the distributed nature of gray matter structural differences in autism spectrum disorder and provide a more comprehensive characterization of autism spectrum disorder-related cortical and subcortical gray matter structural differences during childhood and adolescent development.