Show#223 Autistic traits seen in parents of kids with autism

Monday night at 8pm, be sure to tune in for our newest episode of Hope Saves the Day on Autism Radio Tonight's Show is with Host Paul Cimins talks about a Study by Dr Constantino, director of the William Greenleaf Eliot Division of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at Washington University and psychiatrist-in-chief at St. Louis Children’s Hospital, said the traits related to autism tend to be natural variations in social skills.

Studying children with autism and their parents, researchers have found that when a child has autism, his or her parents are more likely to have autistic traits than parents who don’t have a child with an autism spectrum disorder, as measured by a survey used to identify such characteristics.

 Past studies have found that the siblings of children with autism also tended to have more autistic traits than the siblings of kids without autism. But this study is the first to connect significant numbers of autistic traits in parents to diagnoses of autism in their children.

This study was funded by the National Cancer Institute (NCI) and the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) of the National Institutes of Health (NIH); Autism Speaks and the US Army Medical Research and Material Command.

NIH grant numbers CA50385, HD062171 and HD042541.

Lyall K, Constantino JN, Weisskopf MG, Roberts AL, Ascherio A, Santangelo SL, Parental social responsiveness and risk of autism spectrum disorder in offspring. JAMA Psychiatry, published online June 18, 2014. doi:10.1001/jamapsychiatry.2014.476

Washington University School of Medicine’s 2,100 employed and volunteer faculty physicians also are the medical staff of Barnes-Jewish and St. Louis Children’s hospitals. The School of Medicine is one of the leading medical research, teaching and patient care institutions in the nation, currently ranked sixth in the nation by U.S. News & World Report. Through its affiliations with Barnes-Jewish and St. Louis Children’s hospitals, the School of Medicine is linked to BJC HealthCare.