ArticleeLife2020
Intrinsic excitation-inhibition imbalance affects medial prefrontal cortex differently in autistic men versus women.
Article in eLife, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 97 papers, 3 of them syntheses that pooled it.
What it found
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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.
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Who cites it
97 citing papers in PubMed, 3 syntheses or guidelines pooled it, 182 citations in OpenAlex.
- Glutamatergic Modulation of Brain Function in Psychosis: A Systematic Review of Neuroimaging Studies.Biological psychiatry. Cognitive neuroscience and neuroimaging · 2025Pooled it
- A Systematic Review of Aperiodic Neural Activity in Clinical Investigations.The European journal of neuroscience · 2025Pooled it
- Sex/gender differences in the human autistic brains: A systematic review of 20 years of neuroimaging research.NeuroImage. Clinical · 2021Pooled it
- Trial
- One-week escitalopram intake alters the excitation-inhibition balance in the healthy female brain.Human brain mapping · 2022Trial
- Dynamic Functional Synchronization Profiles in Autism Differ by Spatial Scale and Along Hierarchical Cortical Gradients.Biological psychiatry global open science · 2026Article
- Cascading Periods of Language-Related Brain Plasticity Across Early Childhood.Developmental science · 2026Article
- Preserved intrinsic neural timescale organization with hierarchical variation in autism spectrum disorder.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2026Article
- Prenatal stress, excitatory-inhibitory imbalance, and ADHD risk: a hypothesis-driven perspective on psilocybin-induced neuroplasticity.Translational psychiatry · 2026Review
- Autism subtypes identified using cross-species functional connectivity analyses.Nature neuroscience · 2026Article
- Article
- Brain complexity in response to auditory stimulation improves evaluation of cerebral maturation in premature newborns.Pediatric research · 2026Article
- Camouflaging and autism: Conceptualisation and methodological issues.Autism : the international journal of research and practice · 2026Review
- Cascading periods of language-related brain plasticity across early childhood.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Human stem cell-derived neurons establish functional inhibitory-excitatory cortical circuits in a chimeric transplantation model.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Stroke and motor outcomes are associated with regional and age-specific changes in periodic and aperiodic cortical activity.Experimental physiology · 2026Article
- A Framework Integrating Spiking Cortical Circuit Modeling and Simulation-Based Inference to Probe Biomarkers of Cortical Dysfunction in Alzheimer's Disease.Interdisciplinary sciences, computational life sciences · 2026Article
- Large-scale neural network compensation associated with camouflaging in trait autism and its potential mental health costs.Molecular autism · 2026Article
- Detection of Idiosyncratic Gaze-Fingerprint Signatures in Humans.Psychological science · 2026Article
- Attractor dynamics of a whole-cortex network model predicts emergence and structure of fMRI co-activation patterns in the mouse brain.PLoS computational biology · 2026Article
37 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
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Authors and funding
17 authors at 6 institutions in 7 countries.
Funding
Abstract
Excitation-inhibition (E:I) imbalance is theorized as an important pathophysiological mechanism in autism. Autism affects males more frequently than females and sex-related mechanisms (e.g., X-linked genes, androgen hormones) can influence E:I balance. This suggests that E:I imbalance may affect autism differently in males versus females. With a combination of in-silico modeling and in-vivo chemogenetic manipulations in mice, we first show that a time-series metric estimated from fMRI BOLD signal, the Hurst exponent (H), can be an index for underlying change in the synaptic E:I ratio. In autism we find that H is reduced, indicating increased excitation, in the medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC) of autistic males but not females. Increasingly intact MPFC H is also associated with heightened ability to behaviorally camouflage social-communicative difficulties, but only in autistic females. This work suggests that H in BOLD can index synaptic E:I ratio and that E:I imbalance affects autistic males and females differently.
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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.