{"doi":"10.1101/2020.01.16.909531","title":"Intrinsic excitation-inhibition imbalance affects medial prefrontal cortex differently in autistic men versus women","abstract":"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.","journal":"bioRxiv (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory)","year":2020,"id":120088,"datarank":0.0,"base_score":0.0,"endowment":0.0,"self_citation_contribution":0.0,"citation_network_contribution":0.0,"self_endowment_contribution":0.0,"citer_contribution":0.0,"corpus_percentile":null,"corpus_rank":null,"citation_count":12,"citer_count":0,"citers_with_citation_signal":0,"citers_with_endowment":0,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.9629,"is_data_producer":false,"deposit_databanks":null,"is_oa":true,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"2020-01-01","fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":556936,"name":"Pablo Martínez‐Cañada","orcid":"0000-0003-2634-5229","position":1,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":556937,"name":"Federico Rocchi","orcid":"0000-0003-2609-4722","position":2,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":558011,"name":"Carola Canella","orcid":null,"position":3,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":488067,"name":"Wonsang You","orcid":"0000-0002-6806-7135","position":4,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":556938,"name":"Bhismadev Chakrabarti","orcid":"0000-0002-6649-7895","position":5,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":556939,"name":"Amber Ruigrok","orcid":"0000-0001-7711-8056","position":6,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":52341,"name":"Edward T. Bullmore","orcid":"0000-0002-8955-8283","position":7,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":257917,"name":"John Suckling","orcid":"0000-0002-5098-1527","position":8,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":555753,"name":"Marija Markicevic","orcid":"0000-0003-0983-432X","position":9,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":555752,"name":"Valerio Zerbi","orcid":"0000-0001-7984-9565","position":10,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":52337,"name":"Simon Baron-Cohen","orcid":"0000-0001-9217-2544","position":11,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":268774,"name":"Alessandro Gozzi","orcid":"0000-0002-5731-4137","position":12,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":294682,"name":"Meng‐Chuan Lai","orcid":"0000-0002-9593-5508","position":13,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":249867,"name":"Stefano Panzeri","orcid":"0000-0003-1700-8909","position":14,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":273896,"name":"Michael Lombardo","orcid":"0000-0001-6780-8619","position":15,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":273895,"name":"Stavros Trakoshis","orcid":"0000-0002-8054-1338","position":0,"is_corresponding":true}],"reference_count":116,"raw_metadata":null,"created_at":"2026-07-18T23:14:33.640077Z","pmid":null,"pmcid":null,"fwci":null,"citation_percentile":null,"influential_citations":0,"oa_status":null,"license":null,"views":0,"total_file_size_bytes":0,"version_count":0,"fair_f":null,"fair_a":null,"fair_i":null,"fair_r":null,"fair_zscore":null,"fair_rationale":null,"fair_model":null,"fair_agent_version":null,"fair_fulltext_source":null,"fair_has_llm":null,"fair_computed_at":null,"clinical_trials":[],"software_tools":[],"db_accessions":[],"linked_datasets":[],"topics":[]}