Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry
New researchExamining Autism Spectrum Disorders by Biomarkers: Example From the Oxytocin and Serotonin Systems
Section snippets
Human Participants
All participants were enrolled at the University of Illinois at Chicago Autism Center of Excellence, and were recruited under a protocol studying rigid-compulsive features in ASD. They were assessed with the Autism Diagnostic Interview—Revised (ADI-R),90 the Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule (ADOS),91 and clinical evaluation. Participants were included in this study if they were classified as having strictly defined autism rather than autism spectrum disorder, because they met the
Results
We initially examined whether human OT plasma levels and WB5-HT were normally distributed and whether they differed by sex, reported ancestral background, and age (Table S1, available online). Although WB5-HT approached a normal distribution, OT was positively skewed (skewness = 2.7, kurtosis = 10.3) and required log transformation in all further analyses.
There were no significant differences in log(OT) and WB5-HT across sex (all p values >0.30) or reported ancestral background (all p values
Discussion
Both the human and murine data are consistent with a relationship between peripheral OT and 5-HT biomarkers. In humans, we observed a negative correlation between whole-blood serotonin levels and peripheral OT levels. In mice, we observed that mice lacking the Oxtr gene had higher concentrations of whole-blood serotonin. Both in humans and in mice, the relationships were strongest in younger individuals.
The negative correlation between OT and 5-HT levels in the human data can be interpreted in
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This work was supported in part by a Vanderbilt Luton Society Research Award (J.V., E.H.), a National Alliance for Research on Schizophrenia and Depression (NARSAD) Young Investigator Award (E.H.), a National Institutes of Health (NIH) grant K08MH081066 (J.V.), the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) grant P30HD15052 to the Vanderbilt Kennedy Center for Research on Human Development (E.H., J.V.), NIH Autism Center of Excellence grants P50 HD055751 (E.H.C.), and K23MH082121 (S.J.).
Disclosure: Dr. Veenstra-VanderWeele has received funding from Seaside Therapeutics, Novartis, and Roche Pharmaceuticals, and has served as a consultant for Novartis. Dr. Cook has served as a consultant for and has received funding from Seaside Therapeutics. Drs. Hammock, Yan, Morris, Anderson, Carter, and Jacob, and Mr. Kerr report no biomedical financial interests or potential conflicts of interest.
Supplemental material cited in this article is available online.