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. 2011 Aug 1;70(3):278-82.
doi: 10.1016/j.biopsych.2011.03.026. Epub 2011 May 4.

Diminished gray matter within the hypothalamus in autism disorder: a potential link to hormonal effects?

Florian Kurth  1 , Katherine L Narr, Roger P Woods, Joseph O'Neill, Jeffry R Alger, Rochelle Caplan, James T McCracken, Arthur W Toga, Jennifer G Levitt
Affiliations

Diminished gray matter within the hypothalamus in autism disorder: a potential link to hormonal effects?

Florian Kurth et al. Biol Psychiatry. .

Abstract

Background: Subjects with autism suffer from impairments of social interaction, deviations in language usage, as well as restricted and stereotyped patterns of behavior. These characteristics are found irrespective of age, IQ, and gender of affected subjects. However, brain changes due to age, IQ, and gender might pose potential confounds in autism neuroimaging analyses.

Methods: To investigate gray matter differences in autism that are not related to these potential confounds, we performed a voxel-based morphometry analysis in 52 affected children and adolescents and 52 matched control subjects.

Results: We observed diminished gray matter in a region of the hypothalamus, which synthesizes the behaviorally relevant hormones oxytocin and arginine vasopressin.

Conclusions: This finding provides support for further investigations of the theory of abnormal functioning of this hormonal system in autism and potentially for experimental therapeutic approaches with oxytocin and related neuropeptides.

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Conflict of interest statement

Financial Disclosures:

No author reported biomedical financial interests or potential conflicts of interest.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Localization of significantly reduced grey matter in autism shown on the mean template generated from the entire study population in axial section (a) and basal view of 3D rendering (b). The depicted hypothalamic grey matter difference between the study groups is located adjacent to the optic chiasm. The color bar shows the value of the T-statistic (family-wise error corrected for multiple comparisons).
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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