Our study looked at how a motor-related brain region called the striatum and its connections with other parts of the brain help coordinate movement in autistic and non-autistic boys and girls when they are 3 years old. Read the full study here. You can also learn more about it in this article from The Transmitter.
About this study
Every day, we use the small muscles in our hands and fingers to do things like brush our teeth, button our shirts, and write our names. Our brains help us carry out these highly specific motor skills by carefully controlling how our muscles move. When we are young, our brains learn how to expertly make our muscles move by building strong connections between different parts of the brain that control motor function. These connections might grow in slightly different ways depending on whether we are boys or girls or if we are autistic or not.
Our study looked at how a motor-related brain region called the striatum and its connections with other parts of the brain help coordinate movement in autistic and non-autistic boys and girls when they are 3 years old. We also wanted to see if the way the brain worked at age 3 could tell us how much motor skills would improve by age 5. We wondered if this would be different for autistic boys and autistic girls.
To do this, we used brain imaging and motor skill data from two studies at UC Davis: the Girls with Autism Imaging of Neurodevelopment (GAIN) and the Autism Phenome Project (APP), both led by Dr. Christine Wu Nordahl. These projects follow children at multiple timepoints across childhood starting around 3 years old, a time when motor skills are quickly developing for many children. The GAIN study has a special goal of looking at brain development in autistic girls because they are often not included in brain imaging studies of autism.
For this project, our brain imaging data came from two different types of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans, one measure volume, or how big the striatum is and the other measured the strength of the white matter pathways that connect the striatum with other parts of the brain.
We found that the size of the striatum and the white matter pathways that connect it to other parts of the brain were related to motor skills at age three in autistic boys, but not autistic girls. In autistic girls, we found that the striatum’s white matter at age 3 was related to how well motor skills would develop between age 3 and age 5. These findings tell us that the way that the brain is related to motor skills is different in autistic girls compared to autistic boys.
These findings are important because they show that autistic boys and girls might need different kinds of help to develop their movement skills. Even if their behavior looks the same, their brains might work differently. This means we should think about different ways to support autistic boys and autistic girls as they grow.