Original articlesFunctional disconnectivity of the medial temporal lobe in Asperger’s syndrome
Section snippets
Subjects
Thirteen right-handed male adult volunteers with high-functioning autism or Asperger’s syndrome, diagnosed clinically using standard operational criteria (American Psychiatric Association 1994), and 13 healthy right-handed male adult volunteers were recruited. Participants were not currently taking prescribed or illicit psychotropic drugs and had no history of neurological or nonautistic psychiatric disorders. The two groups were not significantly different in terms of age (mean age [SD] = 31.2
Between-group differences in interregional distance matrices
Arguably, the simplest approach to identifying group differences in whole brain functional connectivity is direct inspection of the matrix of differences in interregional distances. The 90 cortical and subcortical regions under consideration yield 4005 distinct interregional distances for each group. The difference between groups for each distance, after centering of the distance matrices, is summarized in a triangular matrix (Figure 1B) that provides some preliminary evidence for abnormal
Discussion
This is the first study comprehensively to test the hypothesis that autistic spectrum disorders, specifically Asperger’s syndrome, may be associated with functional disconnectivity between brain regions. By combining a classical method of exploratory multivariate analysis (multidimensional scaling) with novel permutation methods for inference, we have been able to demonstrate a number of significant case-control differences in functional integration of specific brain regions.
The clearest
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