A note about genetics in Re to Are we all Aspies

June 13, 2006

I'm fairly new to the group, and please forgive me if this issue has been

mentioned before. In a sense, if we have a child with AS or other problem in

the autism spectrum, we all are very likely to have at least a " touch of Autism "

(as Asperger himself said it). There have been very interesting genetic studies

suggesting that AS is probably linked to 3 or 4 genes (more exactly 'loci',

which means a particular position in a chromosome). Families of children with AS

show a wide variety of autism-like characteristics, all the way from classical

autism to what its called " Broad Autistic Phenotype " or people who have some

autistic features, but not all of them. What many researchers believe is that it

takes all the genes to have the full _expression of AS, but that having some of

the genes may produce different characteristics. It's not black-and-white but a

long range of grays.

I have a 6 yo boy with some type of High Functioning Autism (either Asperger's

or PDD-NOS), and I can see it all over my family and my wife's. My wife, for

example has many of the features very marked, but none of the language

characteristics, just as her 2 siblings. My father has a more typical AS, but my

mother does not, although her father probably had AS too. One of my siblings had

AS, and two more had all the characteristics to impairing degrees, except for

the language abnormalities.

Interestingly, all of them have been people with a great sense of humor. The

capacity to understand humor is supposed to be greatly affected in AS. According

to some research, one of the main aspects affected in all the autism related

disorders is the so called " Theory of Mind " , or the ability to understand that

others have beliefs, desires and intentions that are different from one's own.

Such ability is supposed to be at base of humor. Gee, my son has that, no doubt,

but since very early he has shown a great sense of humor.

Bottom line - and please forgive the long post, we really don't know enough

about AS and what exactly determine its different levels of _expression. Reason

the most to keep advocating before health and education officials and policy

makers on behalf of more funding for research.

Have a great day. F

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