Impairment of dentato-thalamo-cortical pathway in autistic men: language activation data from positron emission tomography

Abstract

Recent evidence suggests disturbances of serotonin synthesis affecting the dentato-thalamo-cortical pathway in autistic boys. We studied possible effects of such disturbances on brain activations for language in autistic adults. Four autistic and five normal men were studied while listening to, repeating, and generating sentences, using [15(O)]-water positron emission tomography (PET). Activation in the right dentate nucleus and in the left frontal area 46 was reduced during verbal auditory and expressive language and enhanced during motor speech functions in the autism as compared to the control group. The thalamus showed group differences concordant with area 46 for expressive language. The results may indicate atypical functional specialization of the dentato-thalamo-cortical pathway and are compatible with a model of region-specific biochemical disturbances in the developing autistic brain.