# Social, Cognitive, and Behavioral Influences on Early Life Aging in Autism

> **NIH NIH K01** · UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LOS ANGELES · 2024 · $182,068

## Abstract

ABSTRACT
Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is characterized by disabling social impairments and restrictive, repetitive
behaviors that emerge in early childhood and persist throughout the lifespan, affecting 2.2% of adults in the
United States. As they age, autistic adults face a range of adverse outcomes, including significantly higher rates
of chronic disease, neurodegenerative conditions, and early mortality. My recent electroencephalography (EEG)
findings further reveal altered trajectories of functional brain aging in ASD, in line with reports of excessive
cognitive aging. However, the mechanisms underlying these age-related declines remain unknown, and by the
time that
age-related decline manifests behaviorally and cognitively crucial opportunities for risk prevention have
already passed. New ‘epigenetic clock’ techniques index the progression of cellular aging processes based on
DNA methylation (DNAm) patterns, providing proxy measures of biological age that predict later cognitive, health,
functional declines, and mortality. I will explore if these sensitive measures of individual aging trajectories may
help to identify autistic individuals at high risk of poor outcomes before patterns of brain activity or behavior begin
to change, specifically asking: (1) Is biological risk for poor aging outcomes increased in autistic adults at midlife?
(2) Are variations in epigenetic risk linked to brain aging markers? (3) Which clinical and environmental
differences during childhood and early adulthood contribute to biological risk variations in this population?
The proposed career development award will allow me to address these aims through new integrated methods.
Facilitated by a multidisciplinary team of expert mentors (Dr. Lord, Dr. Carroll, Dr. Geschwind, and Dr. Senturk),
I will build upon my existing expertise in developmental neuroscience and ASD to acquire new training in
epigenetic and longitudinal lifespan methodologies. I will collect epigenetic and neural (EEG) aging measures
from a unique and deeply phenotyped cohort of individuals with (N=118) and without ASD (N=39) who have
been prospectively followed since age two and are currently 32-36 years old (The ‘Early Diagnosis Study; EDX).
Biological age will be quantified from saliva-derived DNAm patterns using three different well-established
epigenetic clock algorithms. Brain aging will be measured using EEG markers of peak frequency (7-13Hz), which
captures characteristic age-related oscillatory slowing. Together, these studies will inform potential strategies to
identify and address age-related risks in ASD from earlier in development.
The proposed training goals will be the catalyst for a novel and innovative research program focused on lifespan
changes in ASD across multiple levels of measurement and lay the foundation for a longitudinal R01 investigation
of epigenetic, neural, and cognitive aging in the EDX cohort. This research program will address a crucial gap in
our understanding o...

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 10892186
- **Project number:** 5K01MH128612-03
- **Recipient organization:** UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LOS ANGELES
- **Principal Investigator:** Abigail H Dickinson
- **Activity code:** K01 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2024
- **Award amount:** $182,068
- **Award type:** 5
- **Project period:** 2022-08-05 → 2025-07-31

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10892186

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 10892186, Social, Cognitive, and Behavioral Influences on Early Life Aging in Autism (5K01MH128612-03). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-23 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/10892186. Licensed CC0.

---

*[NIH grants dataset](/datasets/nih-grants) · CC0 1.0*