Abstract
Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a neurodevelopmental disorder with multiple associated deficits in both social and cognitive functioning. Diagnosing ASD usually relies on subjective clinical competencies, and research on objective criteria for diagnosing ASD in the early stage is still in its infancy. A recent animal study showed that the looming-evoked defensive response was impaired in mice with ASD, but whether the effect will be observed in human and contribute to finding a robust clinical neural biomarker remain unclear. Here, to investigate the looming-evoked defense response in humans, electroencephalogram responses toward looming and corresponding control stimuli (far and missing type) were recorded in children with ASD and typical developed (TD) children. Results revealed that alpha-band activity in the posterior brain region was strongly suppressed after looming stimuli in the TD group, but remained unchanged in the ASD group. This method could be a novel, objective way to detect ASD earlier. These findings suggest that further investigation of the neural mechanism underlying innate fear from the oscillatory view could be a helpful direction in the future.
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Acknowledgements
This work was supported in part by the National Key R&D Program of China (2021ZD0203902 and 2018YFA0701403), the Youth Innovation Promotion Association of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (2017413), Shenzhen Fund for Guangdong Provincial High level Clinical Key Specialties (No.SZGSP013), Shenzhen Key Medical Discipline Construction Fund (SZXK042), Shenzhen Science and Technology Projects (JCYJ20200109150700942), Guangdong Basic and Applied Basic Research Foundation (No.2020A1515011581), Sanming Project of Medicine in Shenzhen (SZSM201612079) and Guangdong Provincial Natural Science Foundation (2018A030310047).
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XK, PW, LW and JL designed the study. MG and CH, contributed to the literature search. MG, LZ, XK and JL contributed to data collection. CH and MG contributed to data analysis, and the interpretation of results. All authors contributed to writing the paper.
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Han, C., Guo, M., Ke, X. et al. Oscillatory biomarkers of autism: evidence from the innate visual fear evoking paradigm. Cogn Neurodyn 17, 459–466 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11571-022-09839-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11571-022-09839-6