A Behavioral Comparison of Male and Female Adults with High Functioning Autism Spectrum Conditions

By Meng-Chuan Lai, Michael V. Lombardo, G. Pasco, Amber N. V. Ruigrok, Sally J. Wheelwright, Susan A. Sadek, Bhismadev Chakrabarti, Julian Henty, Simon Baron-Cohen. PLoS ONE, 2011

643 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Autism spectrum conditions (ASC) affect more males than females in the general population. However, within ASC it is unclear if there are phenotypic sex differences. Testing for similarities and differences between the sexes is important not only for clinical assessment but also has implications for theories of typical sex differences and of autism. Using cognitive and behavioral measures, we investigated similarities and differences between the sexes in age- and IQ-matched adults with ASC (high-functioning autism or Asperger syndrome). Of the 83 (45 males and 38 females) participants, 62 (33 males and 29 females) met Autism Diagnostic Interview-Revised (ADI-R) cut-off criteria for autism in childhood and were included in all subsequent analyses. The severity of childhood core autism symptoms did not differ between the sexes. Males and females also did not differ in self-reported empathy, systemizing, anxiety, depression, and obsessive-compulsive traits/symptoms or mentalizing performance. However, adult females with ASC showed more lifetime sensory symptoms (p = 0.036), fewer current socio-communication difficulties (p = 0.001), and more self-reported autistic traits (p = 0.012) than males. In addition, females with ASC who also had developmental language delay had lower current performance IQ than those without developmental language delay (p<0.001), a pattern not seen in males. The absence of typical sex differences in empathizing-systemizing profiles within the autism spectrum confirms a prediction from the extreme male brain theory. Behavioral sex differences within ASC may also reflect different developmental mechanisms between males and females with ASC. We discuss the importance of the superficially better socio-communication ability in adult females with ASC in terms of why females with ASC may more often go under-recognized, and receive their diagnosis later, than males.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Education, Genetics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f3cb6b67704b18b88fb3e2d5b0f3c9c4ec1f321f

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Citations in the corpus

“Putting on My Best Normal”: Social Camouflaging in Adults with Autism Spectrum Conditions (2017, methodology): “Previous research has either theorised that camouflaging is more common in females (Lai et al. 2011; Wing 1981), has only included female samples (Bargiela et al.”
Autistic girls and school exclusion: Perspectives of students and their parents (2017, background): “, 2016), genetics (Lai et al., 2011), developmental differences across the genders (Lai et al.”
Disentangling the heterogeneity of autism spectrum disorder through genetic findings (2014, neutral): “47,48 Although overall autism severity does not seem to be associated with gender, 49,50 clear evidence exists of gender differences in presenta tion, particularly in the presence of comorbid features.”
Sex/Gender Differences and Autism: Setting the Scene for Future Research (2015, background): “symptoms and current mentalizing ability, females present less evident autistic behavior in interpersonal contexts.(47) Concurrently, females showgreaterdeviation fromsame-sex/”
Sex Differences in Autism Spectrum Disorder: Evidence from a Large Sample of Children and Adolescents (2011, background): “In one study of high-functioning adults with ASD, females were found to have milder symptomatology in each area of the autism triad (Lai et al. 2011).”
Quantifying and exploring camouflaging in men and women with autism (2016, methodology): “Among a battery of self-report questionnaires obtained in this project (Lai et al., 2011), the Autism Spectrum Quotient (AQ) (Baron-Cohen et al.”