Our results add to the number of cellular contexts in which ASD activates PI3K/Akt signaling with therapeutic effects, including bone regeneration (Ke et al., 2016) as well as Alzheimer’s disease (Zheng et al., 2017; Razani et al., 2021), anxiety (Qiao et al., 2018) and depression (Guo et al., 2019; Shan et al., 2020). This evidence concerns the gene AKT1 and depressive symptom measurement.