Genes - not vaccines - cause autism (U.S. News and World Report)

More progress in understanding the causes of autism, via a new research study:

"On Thursday, scientists reported that 1 percent of people with autism share a variation on chromosome 16. Several other genes have been previously implicated in autism, but this study in the New England Journal of Medicine is the first to find a consistent genetic variation in such large numbers of people. The researchers, led by the Boston-based Autism Consortium, scanned the dna of members of 751 affected families looking for shared clues.

"This finding really nails it," says Andrew Zimmerman, director of medical research at the Center for Autism and Related Disorders at the Kennedy Krieger Institute in Baltimore. He notes that the researchers triple-checked their work by also finding the same genetic anomaly in people tested at Children's Hospital Boston and in Iceland.

Until now, about 10 percent of autism cases have had a known cause, like Fragile X syndrome or congenital rubella. With this extra 1 percent now explained, that leaves another 89 percent to go. But autism is no longer the research backwater it was even a decade ago. Big guns in genetics, like Aravinda Chakravarti, an expert in the genetics of complex diseases at Johns Hopkins's Institute of Genetic Medicine, and Mark Daly, a statistical genetics guru at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Institute in Cambridge, Mass., signed on as coauthors of the NEJM paper.

"There have been very few diseases that have ever been treated without understanding their basis," says Eric Lander, a genomics pioneer and founding director of the Broad Institute in Cambridge, Mass., who was not involved in the study. This discovery is important for a reason that's not immediately obvious, he says. The implicated segment of chromosome 16 holds only about 25 genes. When researchers find the biochemical pathway used by the problematic genes in causing autism's symptoms, it will be easier to find other genes involved in what scientists have long recognized to be a dauntingly complex and varied disorder."


http://health.usnews.com/articles/health/2008/01/09/on-parenting-genes--not-v...



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