Document Type
Article
Subject Area(s)
Adult; Autistic Disorder (genetics); Case-Control Studies; Child; Child Development; Comprehension; Female; Genetic Determinism; Humans; Language; Longitudinal Studies; Male; Mathematics; Middle Aged; Parents (psychology); Pedigree; Phenotype; Reading; Young Adult
Abstract
Genetic liability to autism spectrum disorder (ASD) can be expressed in unaffected relatives through subclinical, genetically meaningful traits, or endophenotypes. This study aimed to identify developmental endophenotypes in parents of individuals with ASD by examining parents' childhood academic development over the school-age period. A cohort of 139 parents of individuals with ASD were studied, along with their children with ASD and 28 controls. Parents' childhood records in the domains of language, reading, and math were studied from grades K-12. Results indicated that relatively lower performance and slower development of skills (particularly language related skills), and an uneven rate of development across domains predicted ASD endophenotypes in adulthood for parents, and the severity of clinical symptoms in children with ASD. These findings may mark childhood indicators of genetic liability to ASD in parents, that could inform understanding of the subclinical expression of ASD genetic liability.
Digital Object Identifier (DOI)
Publication Info
Published in Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, Volume 47, Issue 3, 2017, pages 834-845.
Rights
© The Author(s) 2017. This article is published with open access at Springerlink.com
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.
APA Citation
Losh, M., Martin, G. E., Lee, M., Klusek, J., Sideris, J., Barron, S., & Wassink, T. (2017). Developmental markers of genetic liability to autism in parents: A longitudinal, multigenerational study. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 47(3), 834–845. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-016-2996-x