The Autism studies/research thread

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Background and Objective
The theory of complexity loss in neurodivergent brain is widely acknowledged. However, the findings of autism research do not seem to align well with this theory. We aim to investigate the brain complexity in children with ASD (Autism Spectrum Disorders) compared with the TD (Typical Developed) children in sleeping state.

Method
42 ASD children and 42 TD children were imaged using sleep-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (ss-fMRI), and brain complexity was analyzed by employing sample entropy (SampEn) and transfer entropy (TE). For the ASD group, we also investigated the relationship of symptom severity with SampEn and with TE.

Results
In compared with TD group, ASD group showed significant increased SampEn in the right inferior frontal gyrus. However, in the group of TD, 13 pairs of brain regions exhibit higher TE compared to the ASD group. In the ASD group, the TE of 5 pairs of brain regions is higher than in the TD group.

Conclusion
This sleeping-state fMRI study provide evidence that ASD children exhibited aberrant brain complexity in compare with the TD children. The complexity of the autistic brain is composed of aberrant randomness in brain activity and anomalous information transmission between brain regions. We believe that brain complexity in ASD is a highly valuable area of research. Differences in the entropy of local brain regions, as well as in the transfer entropy between brain regions, may be related to the brain complexity observed in children with ASD.

The majority of people will, at some point, experience a traumatic event, but only 3.9-5.6% will develop a post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD (WHO, 2024).

In autistic people, PTSD may be especially pronounced through maladaptive coping and traumatic memories. Autistic individuals tend to exhibit high avoidance coping, attentional bias towards threatening stimuli, and other autism-associated characteristics or tendencies that, despite being precursors of PTSD, are often dismissed as a ‘normal’ part of ASD (Ehlers & Clark, 2000; Lage et al., 2024).

This can lead to a ‘diagnostic overshadowing’ bias, which means that the PTSD-related challenges and unique features of PTSD in autistic people go unrecognised. Quinton and colleagues (2024) from King’s College London bring this bias into the spotlight in their review of the methods of PTSD assessment and the core symptoms of PTSD in autism.