ArticlePloS one2018
Reduced structural complexity of the right cerebellar cortex in male children with autism spectrum disorder.
Article in PloS one, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 16 papers, 2 of them syntheses that pooled it.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
16 citing papers in PubMed, 2 syntheses or guidelines pooled it.
- Complexity in disguise: a systematic review of fractal analysis in psychiatric neuroimaging.European radiology · 2026Pooled it
- Cortical complexity estimation using fractal dimension: A systematic review of the literature on clinical and nonclinical samples.The European journal of neuroscience · 2022Pooled it
- Behavioral and neural interrelationships of sensory difficulties, intolerance of uncertainty, and anxiety in autistic children.Research in autism · 2025Article
- Molecular architecture of the altered cortical complexity in autism.Molecular autism · 2025Article
- The Cerebellum-Ventral Tegmental Area Microcircuit and Its Implications for Autism Spectrum Disorder: A Narrative Review.Neuropsychiatric disease and treatment · 2024Review
- Fractal Dimension Analysis in Neurological Disorders: An Overview.Advances in neurobiology · 2024Review
- The fractal brain: scale-invariance in structure and dynamics.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2023Review
- Structural brain abnormalities and their association with language impairment in school-aged children with Autism Spectrum Disorder.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Sexual dimorphism in the relationship between brain complexity, volume and general intelligence (g): a cross-cohort study.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Transcriptional consequences of MBD5 disruption in mouse brain and CRISPR-derived neurons.Molecular autism · 2020Article
- Article
- Altered Cerebellar White Matter in Sensory Processing Dysfunction Is Associated With Impaired Multisensory Integration and Attention.Frontiers in psychology · 2020Article
- Contraction of distance and duration production in autism spectrum disorder.Scientific reports · 2019Article
- Cerebellar modulation of the reward circuitry and social behavior.Science (New York, N.Y.) · 2019Article
- Opposite Expression Patterns ofFrontiers in psychiatry · 2019Article
- Increased scale-free dynamics in salience network in adult high-functioning autism.NeuroImage. Clinical · 2019Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The cerebellum contains 80% of all neurons in the human brain and contributes prominently to implicit learning and predictive processing across motor, sensory, and cognitive domains. As morphological features of the cerebellum in atypically developing individuals remain unexplored in-vivo, this is the first study to use high-resolution 3D fractal analysis to estimate fractal dimension (FD), a measure of structural complexity of an object, of the left and right cerebellar cortex (automatically segmented from Magnetic Resonance Images using FreeSurfer), in male children with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) (N = 20; mean age: 8.8 years old, range: 7.13-10.27) and sex, age, verbal-IQ, and cerebellar volume-matched typically developing (TD) boys (N = 18; mean age: 8.9 years old, range: 6.47-10.52). We focus on an age range within the 'middle and late childhood' period of brain development, between 6 and 12 years. A Mann-Whitney U test revealed a significant reduction in the FD of the right cerebellar cortex in ASD relative to TD boys (P = 0.0063, Bonferroni-corrected), indicating flatter and less regular surface protrusions in ASD relative to TD males. Consistent with the prediction that the cerebellum participates in implicit learning, those ASD boys with a higher (vs. lower) PIQ>VIQ difference showed higher, more normative complexity values, closer to TD children, providing new insight on our understanding of the neurological basis of differences in verbal and performance cognitive abilities that often characterize individuals with ASD.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.