Children born into families with older siblings who have autism have a higher risk of developing the condition themselves, even more so than previously thought.
Dr. Sally Ozonoff, lead author of the study that appeared in Pediatrics Magazine and vice chair for Research at the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the UC Davis M.I.N.D. Institute said that she and her team expected the rates to be significant, but not as high as they found. This finding just adds to the existing puzzle – scientists have not been able to pinpoint the key cause of autism as either genetic or environmental and the the scale tips in favor of one or the other with each new study. In this case, it points to genetics. Dr. Ozonoff further noted that the main message of this study at present is that “primary care physicians need to look at infants more closely when they are born to a family with children with autism.”
In the study researchers monitored from birth to 36 months 664 infants who were registered with the Baby Siblings Research Consortium because they had an older biological sibling with autism. Earlier studies estimated the autism recurrence risk to be between 3% and 10%, but this study found the risk to be 18.7%. In families with more than one affected sibling, the risk went up to 32.2%. The risk for male infants was three times higher than the risk for female infants (26% versus 9% of risk). Factors such as the age of parent or the gender of the older sibling were not predictors of the condition.
Tags: autism, causes for autism, environmental factors, genetic factors
This entry was posted on Friday, August 19th, 2011 at 2:03 pm and is filed under General Topics, healthy baby. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
