Effects of Overweight or Obesity on Brain Resting State Functional Connectivity of Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder

Evidence on neurophysiological correlates of coexisting autism spectrum disorders (ASD) and overweight/obesity may elucidate mechanisms leading to the observed greater risk of obesity in children with ASD. An exploratory secondary data analysis was performed on resting state functional magnetic resonance imaging (rs-fMRI) data of children downloaded from the ABIDE Preprocessed database (n = 81). Children with isolated ASD showed hypo-connectivity between anterior and posterior default mode network (DMN) (p = 0.003; FWER). Children with coexisting ASD and overweight/obesity showed hyper-connectivity between anterior and posterior DMN (p = 0.015; FWER). More evidence is needed to confirm these contrasting rs-fMRI connectivity profiles and to explicate causal inferences regarding neurophysiological mechanisms associated with coexisting ASD and overweight/obesity.