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Updated: Jun 11, 2025
Testing Sensory and Multisensory Function in Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder
Published on: April 22, 2015
Parasagittal dural volume correlates with cerebrospinal fluid volume and developmental delay in children with autism
Nivedita Agarwal1, Giulia Frigerio2, Gloria Rizzato2
1Diagnostic Imaging and Neuroradiology Unit, IRCCS Scientific Institute E. Medea, Bosisio Parini, Lecco LC, Italy. nivedita.agarwal@lanostrafamiglia.it.
Background:
The parasagittal dura, a tissue that lines the walls of the superior sagittal sinus, acts as an active site for immune-surveillance, promotes the reabsorption of cerebrospinal fluid, and facilitates the removal of metabolic waste products from the brain. Cerebrospinal fluid is important for the distribution of growth factors that signal immature neurons to proliferate and migrate. Autism spectrum disorder is characterized by altered cerebrospinal fluid dynamics.
Methods:
In this retrospective study, we investigated potential correlations between parasagittal dura volume, brain structure volumes, and clinical severity scales in young children with autism spectrum disorder. We employed a semi-supervised two step pipeline to extract parasagittal dura volume from 3D-T2 Fluid Attenuated Inversion Recovery sequences, based on U-Net followed by manual refinement of the extracted parasagittal dura masks.
Results:
Here we show that the parasagittal dura volume does not change with age but is significantly correlated with cerebrospinal fluid (p-value = 0.002), extra-axial cerebrospinal fluid volume (p-value = 0.0003) and severity of developmental delay (p-value = 0.024).
Conclusions:
These findings suggest that autism spectrum disorder children with severe developmental delay may have a maldeveloped parasagittal dura that potentially perturbs cerebrospinal fluid dynamics.
