Journal
INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF ENVIRONMENTAL RESEARCH AND PUBLIC HEALTH
Volume 18, Issue 10, Pages -Publisher
MDPI
DOI: 10.3390/ijerph18105132
Keywords
mini-basketball; autism spectrum disorder; social communication; executive control network; functional connectivity
Funding
- National Natural Science Foundation of China [31771243]
- Fok Ying Tung Education Foundation [141113]
Ask authors/readers for more resources
A 12-week mini-basketball training program has positive effects on social communication and the executive control network in preschool children with ASD. Social responsiveness, social cognition, and social communication showed significant improvement in the intervention group. Functional connectivity between certain brain regions increased in the experimental group while decreased in the control group.
This study evaluated the effect of a 12-week mini-basketball training program (MBTP) on social communication (SC) and the executive control network (ECN) in preschool children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). We finally assigned 30 preschool children with ASD to an experiment group (n = 15, 12 males, 3 females) or a control group (n = 15, 13 males, 2 females). The experiment group participated in a 12-week MBTP (40-min sessions per day, 5 days a week), while the control group only received the institutional routine behavioral rehabilitation intervention. The SC of preschool children with ASD was measured using the Social Responsiveness Scale, Second Edition (SRS-2), whereas functional connectivity (FC) of the ECN was assessed using resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (rs-fMRI) at pre-and post-test. Our results showed that SC exhibited significant improvement in the intervention group, especially in SRS-2 total score, social cognition, and social communication. We found significantly enhanced functional connectivity between the right cerebellum and left inferior frontal gyrus in the experimental group, while functional connectivity between the left middle temporal gyrus and right cerebellum were decreased in the control group. Furthermore, there were no significant correlations between the change in SC scores and FC of the ECN. Altogether, this study provides valuable insights that a 12-week MBTP improves SC and functional connectivity of the ECN in preschool children with ASD. We further inferred that neural mechanisms might be associated with changing the ECN of preschool ASD children caused by the 12-week MBTP.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available