Association of Sex With Neurobehavioral Markers of Executive Function in 2-Year-Olds at High and Low Likelihood of Autism

By T. St John, Annette M. Estes, Heather Cody Hazlett, N. Marrus, Catherine A. Burrows, Kevin Donovan, Santiago Torres Gomez, R. Grzadzinski, J. Parish-Morris, Rachel Gimpel Smith and 9 more. JAMA Network Open, 2023

1,739 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Key Points Question Are executive function (EF) differences early in development associated with sex, familial likelihood for autism, and alterations in brain volume? Findings In this cohort study of 165 children aged 24 months at high and low familial likelihood for autism, girls and boys at high likelihood had significantly lower EF than girls and boys at low likelihood. Differences in brain-behavior associations across sex and familial likelihood for autism were also found. Meaning This pattern of findings suggests that EF impairments may aggregate in families with an autistic proband, particularly in girls.

Subfields: Clinical Psychology, Cognitive Neuroscience, Psychiatry and Mental health

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/aca7cb2bb531e60a590e40a256674b67f0a88cde