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Decreased Functional and Structural Connectivity is Associated with Core Symptom Improvement in Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder After Mini-basketball Training Program

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Abstract

Exercise intervention has been proven helpful to ameliorate core symptoms of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). However, the underlying mechanisms are not fully understood. In this study, we carried out a 12-week mini-basketball training program (MBTP) on ASD children and examined the changes of brain functional and structural networks before and after exercise intervention. We applied individual-based method to construct functional network and structural morphological network, and investigated their alterations following MBTP as well as their associations with the change in core symptom. Structural MRI and resting-state functional MRI data were obtained from 58 ASD children aged 3–12 years (experiment group: n = 32, control group: n = 26). ASD children who received MBTP intervention showed several distinguishable alternations compared to the control without special intervention. These included decreased functional connectivity within the sensorimotor network (SM) and between SM and the salience network, decreased morphological connectivity strength in a cortical-cortical network centered on the left inferior temporal gyrus, and a subcortical–cortical network centered on the left caudate. Particularly, the aforementioned functional and structural changes induced by MBTP were associated with core symptoms of ASD. Our findings suggested that MBTP intervention could be an effective approach to improve core symptoms in ASD children, decrease connectivity in both structure and function networks, and may drive the brain change towards normal-like neuroanatomy.

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Acknowledgments

This work was supported by Science and Technology Planning Project of Liaoning Province (no. 2022JH2/10700002); The fifth “333 Project” scientific research funding project of Jiangsu Province (BRA2019283); Scientific research and practice innovation Project of Jiangsu Province (3161).

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  1. Dongyue Zhou and Zhimei Liu have contributed equally to this work.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Biomedical Engineering, Faculty of Medicine, Dalian University of Technology, Dalian, China

    Dongyue Zhou, Yunge Zhang, Lin Lin, Fengyu Cong & Huanjie Li

  2. College of Physical Education, Yangzhou University, Yangzhou, China

    Zhimei Liu, Kelong Cai & Aiguo Chen

  3. Department of Oncology, Affiliated Zhongshan Hospital of Dalian University, Dalian, China

    Guanyu Gong

  4. Faculty of Information Technology, University of Jyväskylä, Jyväskylä, Finland

    Huashuai Xu & Fengyu Cong

  5. Key Laboratory of Integrated Circuit and Biomedical Electronic System, Dalian University of Technology, Dalian, Liaoning Province, China

    Fengyu Cong & Huanjie Li

  6. Key Laboratory of Brain Disease and Integration of Sport and Health, Yangzhou University, Yangzhou, China

    Aiguo Chen

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  1. Dongyue Zhou
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Contributions

DZ and ZL contributed equally to this study. DZ conducted data analysis and drafted the manuscript; ZL provided clinical expertise, data collection and the manuscript correction; AC designed and conducted mini-basketball training program; HL designed the data analysis pipeline and drafted the manuscript; KC contributed to MRI data collection; DZ, YZ, LL, FC, HL contributed to data analysis and interpretation of result; HX contributed to the figure; GG helped revise the grammar and some expressions to make the manuscript easier to read. All authors provided critical revision of the manuscript. All authors approved the final manuscript.

Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Huanjie Li or Aiguo Chen.

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Ethical Approval

The study with quasi-experimental design was conducted between October and December 2018 in Yangzhou, China. Approval letters have been received from both the Ethics Committee of Yangzhou Maternal and Child Health Hospital (No. 201806001) and the Ethics and Human Protection Committee of the Affiliated Hospital of Yangzhou University. Meanwhile, this study was registered with the Chinese Clinical Trial Registry (ChiCTR1900024973) on 5 August 2019, prior to the beginning of experiments.

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Zhou, D., Liu, Z., Gong, G. et al. Decreased Functional and Structural Connectivity is Associated with Core Symptom Improvement in Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder After Mini-basketball Training Program. J Autism Dev Disord (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-023-06160-x

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