Autism, one of the best validated neuropsychiatric disorders of childhood, may represent the final common outcome of multiple causative factors. Heredity appears to play an important role: families with one autistic child face a recurrence risk for subsequent children that is 100 times greater than the population risk. Recent studies of twins show that between 60 and 90% of identical twin pairs are concordant for autism, whereas in non-identical twins, the concordance rate is zero. Together, these data strongly support the hypothesis that autism results from a strong, thought not absolute, genetic influence. The Utah Autism Program Project aims to identify genetic and non-genetic subgroups of autism by studying possible manifestations of the disorder and the familiar amount of transmission of these manifestations in autistic children and their first-degree family members. The findings will be contrasted to control groups of families in which a proband has been affected with a nonspecific mental retardation or with dyslexia. Features to be measured include immunologic competence, cognitive, psychiatric, morphologic differences and finally, variables in the brain detected by magnetic resonance imaging studies.
Showing the most recent 10 out of 535 publications
