Brief intensive social gaze training reorganizes functional brain connectivity in boys with fragile X syndrome.
Manish SaggarJennifer L BrunoScott S HallPublished in: Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) (2022)
Boys with fragile X syndrome (FXS), the leading known genetic cause of autism spectrum disorder (ASD), demonstrate significant impairments in social gaze and associated weaknesses in communication, social interaction, and other areas of adaptive functioning. Little is known, however, concerning the impact of behavioral treatments for these behaviors on functional brain connectivity in this population. As part of a larger study, boys with FXS (mean age 13.23 ± 2.31 years) and comparison boys with ASD (mean age 12.15 ± 2.76 years) received resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging scans prior to and following social gaze training administered by a trained behavior therapist in our laboratory. Network-agnostic connectome-based predictive modeling of pretreatment resting-state functional connectivity data revealed a set of positive (FXS > ASD) and negative (FXS < ASD) edges that differentiated the groups significantly and consistently across all folds of cross-validation. Following administration of the brief training, the FXS and ASD groups demonstrated reorganization of connectivity differences. The divergence in the spatial pattern of reorganization response, based on functional connectivity differences pretreatment, suggests a unique pattern of response to treatment in the FXS and ASD groups. These results provide further support for implementing targeted behavioral treatments to ameliorate syndrome-specific behavioral features in FXS.
Keyphrases
- resting state
- autism spectrum disorder
- functional connectivity
- attention deficit hyperactivity disorder
- intellectual disability
- healthcare
- magnetic resonance imaging
- mental health
- case report
- computed tomography
- virtual reality
- cancer therapy
- single cell
- magnetic resonance
- drug delivery
- copy number
- multiple sclerosis
- gene expression
- brain injury
- subarachnoid hemorrhage
- deep learning
- big data
- artificial intelligence
- smoking cessation
- dna methylation
- replacement therapy
- white matter
- combination therapy
- network analysis