The Role of the Amygdala in Autism

杏仁核在自闭症中的作用

• 批准号: 6862325
• 负责人: Blythe Anne Corbett
• 金额: $ 14.05万
• 依托单位: UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA AT DAVIS
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 财政年份: 2005
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2005-05-10 至 2010-04-30
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/6862325
• 关键词: amygdala; anxiety; autism; behavior test; behavioral /social science research tag; bioimaging /biomedical imaging; child mental disorders; child psychology; clinical research; cues; developmental disease /disorder; developmental neurobiology; face expression; frontal lobe /cortex; functional magnetic resonance imaging; human subject; middle childhood (6-11); mood disorders; neural information processing; neuroimaging; neuropathology; neuropsychological tests; perception disorder; psychological stressor; social behavior disorders; social perception

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The overarching goal of this Mentored Clinical Scientist Award is to allow the applicant to develop requisite expertise that is essential for conducting neurobiological assessments of amygdala function in children with autism. Funds from the K08 award would allow reduction of clinical responsibilities and enable the candidate to pursue a series of investigations that are designed to provide an important context for career development in translational clinical research. The central component of the training program is mentorship in neuroimaging as it relates to the socioemotional functioning of children with autism. The long-term goal of the applicant is to develop an independent affective neuroscience research program that applies the methods of neuropsychology and neuroimaging to the study and treatment of children with autism. Several Lines of research including neuropathology, lesion studies, and neuroimaging have provided converging evidence implicating the amygdala in the pathogenesis of autism. A central hypothesis of this proposal is that dysregulation of the amygdala contributes to various impairments in autism including increased response to potentially threatening stimuli, deficits in implicit and explicit emotion perception, and limited social behavior. Our main research objective, therefore, is to use established fMRI probes of the amygdala to evaluate its functional status in autism. The experiments include tasks that activate the amygdala across a range of processing skills from basic encoding of emotional information to social knowledge and judgment. We propose that a disassociation exists in children with autism such that the amygdala is hyperactive in the basic detection of threat but does not serve the computationally more demanding role of conveying socioemotional relevance and context to other brain regions, such as the frontal lobe, during complex social situations. If true, the autistic amygdala might lead to the misperception of social situations through a failure to accurately read social cues resulting in inappropriate behavioral responding in social situations.

描述（由申请人提供）：该指导临床科学家奖的总体目标是让申请人培养必要的专业知识，这对于对自闭症儿童的杏仁核功能进行神经生物学评估至关重要。 K08 奖项的资金将允许减少临床责任，并使候选人能够进行一系列旨在为转化临床研究的职业发展提供重要背景的调查。培训计划的核心部分是神经影像学方面的指导，因为它与自闭症儿童的社会情感功能有关。申请人的长期目标是开发一个独立的情感神经科学研究项目，将神经心理学和神经影像学的方法应用于自闭症儿童的研究和治疗。包括神经病理学、病变研究和神经影像学在内的多项研究提供了一致的证据，表明杏仁核与自闭症的发病机制有关。该提议的一个中心假设是，杏仁核的失调会导致自闭症的各种损伤，包括对潜在威胁刺激的反应增强、内隐和外显情绪感知的缺陷以及社交行为受限。 因此，我们的主要研究目标是使用已建立的杏仁核功能磁共振成像探针来评估其在自闭症中的功能状态。这些实验包括激活杏仁核的一系列处理技能的任务，从基本的情感信息编码到社会知识和判断。我们认为，自闭症儿童中存在分离，使得杏仁核在基本的威胁检测中过度活跃，但在复杂的过程中，不能发挥向其他大脑区域（例如额叶）传达社会情感相关性和背景的计算要求更高的作用。社交场合。如果属实，自闭症患者的杏仁核可能会因无法准确解读社交线索而导致对社交情境的误解，从而导致在社交情境中做出不恰当的行为反应。