New Study: Autism has Multiple Genetic Roots | Suite101 - 3 views
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The study’s major finding was that children with ASD have significantly more CNVs affecting their genes than children without ASD. Children with ASD have 20 percent more CNVs in general, and 70 percent more CNVs impacting genes known to be associated with ASD or cognitive problems. Significantly, many of the genes that are affected control important functions such as cell proliferation and cell-to-cell communication.
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Some of the newly discovered genetic variants are inherited, and are found in parents or siblings of children with them. Others, however, seem to have originated spontaneously in the affected child, and do not appear in other family members.
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While these findings add significantly to the scientific understanding of the genetic and biological underpinnings of ASD, the immediate usefulness is limited. That’s because there are a very large number of CNVs, and each child shows a different pattern of genetic changes. Each of these changes is rare; no CNV showed up in more than one percent of the children studied.
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