• Elizabeth Shephard, Charlotte Tye, Karen L Ashwood, Bahar Azadi, Mark H Johnson, Tony Charman, Philip Asherson, Grainne McLoughlin, and Patrick F Bolton.
• Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience, King's College London, UK. Electronic address: elizabeth.1.shephard@kcl.ac.uk.
• Cortex. 2019 Aug 1; 117: 96-110.

AbstractAutism spectrum disorder (ASD) and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) are common and impairing neurodevelopmental disorders that frequently co-occur. The neurobiological mechanisms involved in ASD and ADHD are not fully understood. However, alterations in large-scale neural networks have been proposed as core deficits in both ASD and ADHD and may help to disentangle the neurobiological basis of these disorders and their co-occurrence. In this study, we examined similarities and differences in large-scale oscillatory neural networks between boys aged 8-13 years with ASD (n = 19), ADHD (n = 18), ASD + ADHD (n = 29) and typical development (Controls, n = 26). Oscillatory neural networks were computed using graph-theoretical methods from electroencephalographic (EEG) data collected during an eyes-open resting-state and attentional control and social cognition tasks in which we previously reported disorder-specific atypicalities in oscillatory power and event-related potentials (ERPs). We found that children with ASD showed significant hypoconnectivity in large-scale networks during all three task conditions compared to children without ASD. In contrast, children with ADHD showed significant hyperconnectivity in large-scale networks during the attentional control and social cognition tasks, but not during the resting-state, compared to children without ADHD. Children with co-occurring ASD + ADHD did not differ from children with ASD when paired with this group and vice versa when paired with the ADHD group, indicating that these children showed both ASD-like hypoconnectivity and ADHD-like hyperconnectivity. Our findings suggest that ASD and ADHD are associated with distinct alterations in large-scale oscillatory networks, and these atypicalities present together in children with both disorders. These alterations appear to be task-independent in ASD but task-related in ADHD, and may underlie other neurocognitive atypicalities in these disorders.Copyright © 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

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