Abstract
Certain behavioral characteristics of autism spectrum disorder can be found in otherwise healthy people. Individuals with difficulties in social adaptation may have subclinical autistic traits; however, effective biomarkers of these traits have not yet been established. There is a dire need for objective indices of these traits that combine behavior, brain images, and genetic information. In this study, we examined the association among a single nucleotide polymorphism of NRXN1 (rs858932; C/G), autistic traits, and brain structure in 311 healthy adults. We found that carriers of minor alleles (carriers of the G-allele) had significantly higher systemizing scores than major-allele (C-allele) homozygotes. Furthermore, the regional white matter volume in the right anterior limb of the internal capsule was significantly greater in carriers of the G-allele than in C-allele homozygotes. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first report of NRXN1 rs858932 being involved in systemizing and the brain structure of healthy adults. Our findings provide insight into the effects of genetics on autistic traits and their respective neural substrates.
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Data availability
All the experimental data obtained in this study will be made available to the ethics committee of Tohoku University, school of medicine. The data sharing should be first approved by the ethics committee of Tohoku University, school of medicine. Requests to access the datasets should be directed to Hikaru Takeuchi (Email: hikaru.takeuchi.b5@tohoku.ac.jp).
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Acknowledgements
We thank Dr. Satoshi Miyata for supporting the statistical analysis of the behavioral data. We also thank all the participants and our colleagues at Tohoku University for their support. We would like to thank Editage (www.editage.com) for English language editing.
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This study was supported by JST/RISTEX, JST/CREST, and Grant-in-Aid for JSPS Fellows (Grant Number: 17J02379).
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Shiota, Y., Matsudaira, I., Takeuchi, H. et al. The influence of NRXN1 on systemizing and the brain structure in healthy adults. Brain Imaging and Behavior 16, 692–701 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11682-021-00530-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11682-021-00530-8