Are Autistic Traits in the General Population Related to Global and Regional Brain Differences?

Abstract

There is accumulating evidence that autistic-related traits in the general population lie on a continuum, with autism spectrum disorders representing the extreme end of this distribution. Here, we tested the hypothesis of a possible relationship between autistic traits and brain morphometry in the general population. Participants completed the short autism-spectrum quotient-questionnaire (AQ); T1-anatomical and DWI-scans were acquired. Associations between autistic traits and gray matter, and white matter microstructural-integrity were performed on the exploration-group (N = 204; 105 males, M-age = 22.85), and validated in the validation-group (N = 304; 155 males, M-age = 22.82). No significant associations were found between AQ-scores and brain morphometry in the exploration-group, or after pooling the data. This questions the assumption that autistic traits and their morphological associations do lie on a continuum in the general population.

Fig. 1

Scatterplot of the total scores on the AQ-28 for the Exploration sample (black diamonds) and Validation sample (gray squares)

Fig. 2

Cortical thickness coupling. The part above the diagonal represents the Z-values of the partial correlations controlled for AQ-28 (and age, sex, handedness, level of education and intracranial volume), the lower part of the diagonal represents the Z-values of the partial correlations controlled for age, sex, handedness, level of education and intracranial volume (see suppl. Table 1 for denotation of numbers)