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      Is synaesthesia more common in autism?

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          Abstract

          Background

          Synaesthesia is a neurodevelopmental condition in which a sensation in one modality triggers a perception in a second modality. Autism (shorthand for Autism Spectrum Conditions) is a neurodevelopmental condition involving social-communication disability alongside resistance to change and unusually narrow interests or activities. Whilst on the surface they appear distinct, they have been suggested to share common atypical neural connectivity.

          Methods

          In the present study, we carried out the first prevalence study of synaesthesia in autism to formally test whether these conditions are independent. After exclusions, 164 adults with autism and 97 controls completed a synaesthesia questionnaire, Autism Spectrum Quotient, and Test of Genuineness-Revised (ToG-R) online.

          Results

          The rate of synaesthesia in adults with autism was 18.9% (31 out of 164), almost three times greater than in controls (7.22%, 7 out of 97, P <0.05). ToG-R proved unsuitable for synaesthetes with autism.

          Conclusions

          The significant increase in synaesthesia prevalence in autism suggests that the two conditions may share some common underlying mechanisms. Future research is needed to develop more feasible validation methods of synaesthesia in autism.

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          Most cited references33

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          Cortical activation and synchronization during sentence comprehension in high-functioning autism: evidence of underconnectivity.

          Marcel Just, Vladimir L. Cherkassky, Timothy A. Keller … (2004)
          The brain activation of a group of high-functioning autistic participants was measured using functional MRI during sentence comprehension and the results compared with those of a Verbal IQ-matched control group. The groups differed in the distribution of activation in two of the key language areas. The autism group produced reliably more activation than the control group in Wernicke's (left laterosuperior temporal) area and reliably less activation than the control group in Broca's (left inferior frontal gyrus) area. Furthermore, the functional connectivity, i.e. the degree of synchronization or correlation of the time series of the activation, between the various participating cortical areas was consistently lower for the autistic than the control participants. These findings suggest that the neural basis of disordered language in autism entails a lower degree of information integration and synchronization across the large-scale cortical network for language processing. The article presents a theoretical account of the findings, related to neurobiological foundations of underconnectivity in autism.
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            Autism and abnormal development of brain connectivity.

            Matthew Belmonte, Greg Allen, Andrea Beckel-Mitchener … (2004)
            Article 0 comments Cited 355 times – based on 0 reviews     Review now
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              Unusual brain growth patterns in early life in patients with autistic disorder: an MRI study.

              E Courchesne, C. Karns, H Davis … (2001)
              To quantify developmental abnormalities in cerebral and cerebellar volume in autism. The authors studied 60 autistic and 52 normal boys (age, 2 to 16 years) using MRI. Thirty autistic boys were diagnosed and scanned when 5 years or older. The other 30 were scanned when 2 through 4 years of age and then diagnosed with autism at least 2.5 years later, at an age when the diagnosis of autism is more reliable. Neonatal head circumferences from clinical records were available for 14 of 15 autistic 2- to 5-year-olds and, on average, were normal (35.1 +/- 1.3 cm versus clinical norms: 34.6 +/- 1.6 cm), indicative of normal overall brain volume at birth; one measure was above the 95th percentile. By ages 2 to 4 years, 90% of autistic boys had a brain volume larger than normal average, and 37% met criteria for developmental macrencephaly. Autistic 2- to 3-year-olds had more cerebral (18%) and cerebellar (39%) white matter, and more cerebral cortical gray matter (12%) than normal, whereas older autistic children and adolescents did not have such enlarged gray and white matter volumes. In the cerebellum, autistic boys had less gray matter, smaller ratio of gray to white matter, and smaller vermis lobules VI-VII than normal controls. Abnormal regulation of brain growth in autism results in early overgrowth followed by abnormally slowed growth. Hyperplasia was present in cerebral gray matter and cerebral and cerebellar white matter in early life in patients with autism.
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                Author and article information

                Journal
                Journal ID (nlm-ta): Mol Autism
                Journal ID (iso-abbrev): Mol Autism
                Title: Molecular Autism
                Publisher: BioMed Central
                ISSN (Electronic): 2040-2392
                Publication date Collection: 2013
                Publication date (Electronic): 20 November 2013
                Volume: 4
                Page: 40
                Affiliations
                [1 ]Autism Research Centre, Department of Psychiatry, University of Cambridge, Douglas House, 18B Trumpington Rd, Cambridge CB2 8AH, UK
                [2 ]Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, 6500 AH, Nijmegen, The Netherlands
                [3 ]Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour, Radboud University Nijmegen, Nijmegen, The Netherlands
                [4 ]Robert S. Boas Center for Genomics and Human Genetics, The Feinstein Institute for Medical Research, North Shore-LIJ, Manhasset 11030, NY, USA
                Article
                Publisher ID: 2040-2392-4-40
                DOI: 10.1186/2040-2392-4-40
                PMC ID: 3834557
                PubMed ID: 24252644
                SO-VID: 2b31c3bb-38e2-46ba-bafd-3f777961b8cf
                Copyright © Copyright © 2013 Baron-Cohen et al.; licensee BioMed Central Ltd.
                License:

                This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

                History
                Date received : 18 June 2013
                Date accepted : 18 September 2013
                Categories
                Subject: Research

                ScienceOpen disciplines: Neurosciences
                Data availability:
                ScienceOpen disciplines: Neurosciences

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