The goal of the proposed project is to determine how individual variation in brain development from childhoodto adulthood is associated with variation in clinical course and outcome in autism. We will achieve this goal inthree steps. We will first quantify individual whole and regional brain development from imaging data across sixtime points collected over 15 years using magnetic resonance imaging (volume, cortical thickness, functionalconnectivity, white matter microstructure) and concurrent clinical and neuropsychological evaluations. The sixtime points will include the four time points from our existing 10-year longitudinal study (140 male participantswith autism and 75 age-matched typically developing participants) plus two more collected over the next fiveyears by the same multisite interdisciplinary team. These extended cohort sequential longitudinal data will span3-53 years of age. We will analyze age-period-cohort effects across our wide age range. More data will provideenough power to test existence of linear and curvilinear developmental arcs at individual, cohort, and grouplevels. We will investigate the specificity to autism by comparison to a reading disorder group. Second, we willidentify mediating and modulating factors within brain development that help explain why some individualscontinue to have severe autism while others improve. Third, we will analyze associations between longitudinalbrain functional development and clinical outcome by evaluating the mechanism by which impairment in long-range connectivity and inhibition may ultimately impact adult prognosis. Finally, we explore how trajectories oflate brain development may interact with the loss of secondary school services. Our findings will elucidate howbrain changes modulate the severity of core autism symptoms and in the cognitive profile of individuals withthe disorder. Understanding the paths of late brain development and the relation between brain maturation andcognitive/behavioral changes is essential to identify biological mechanisms involved and to understand howthey interact with contextual factors.
Interagency Autism Coordinating Committee (IACC)
Autism Research Database (AFD)
