Welcome to the World of Aspie Mum

A mild-mannered copywriter by day, in my evenings I transform into amazing Aspie Mum.

Read on for tales of my DS (the 'Monkey') and plenty of Asperger Syndrome/ ASD news, link and more!

Friday 16 March 2007

Autism may be caused by as many as 100 genes

Those who have experienced autism know it's complex behaviourally. According to a Reuters report, genetically it's posing a real challenge for scientists who are realising as many as 100 genes involved.

Experts have determined that autism has a genetic cause, however to understand it better, the DNA of autistic patients and their families are being analysed to determine the precise genes affected.

Funded by the National Institute of Mental Health, Dr. Jonathan Sebat of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York and colleagues across the United States, in Finland and in Britain looked at the DNA of people in 264 families.

Dr Thomas Insel, director of the National Institute for Mental Health said: “These findings certainly complicate the search for genes contributing to autism. These are rare changes, dispersed across the genome, and they tell us that autism may be the final common path for many different genetic abnormalities.”

The small changes are not so much genetic mutations, rather they are copy number variations — extra copies or missing stretches of DNA. An example of this was a child with Asperger syndrome was missing DNA from a stretch of 27 genes.

I, for one, am eager for follow-up research for these findings!

2 comments:

concerned heart said...

Karen you may be interested in reading this paper The High Rate of Spontaneous Mutations: Is it a health risk? James F. Crow 1997
http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/abstract/94/16/8380 For more information you might be interested in the paper I wrote for the EBD Blog: http://ebdblog.com/paternalage/

Karen Cotton said...

Thanks! I will definitely be having a look at it today!