Is aspergers genetic?

Post Reply New Topic

I'd say it's genetic. My father has some pretty strong aspie traits (literal thought patterns, lack of ToM, obsessive interests, to name the obvious ones), and I wouldn't be surprised if there were other people in my family on the spectrum as well.

I think it's kind of a two layer thing.

Firstly - I think some people are born with varying potential to be autistic.

Secondly - Then some environmental factors in the womb or early in life turn it on.

So... a few will just be born autistic no matter what, some have the capacity to be autistic and something in their environment switches it on (or not) when they are quite young, while most will never be autistic.

My theory for what it's worth

Scientists studying autism currently think that both genetics and pre-natal factors play a role, based on available evidence, but they believe that genetics plays a greater role. The heritability estimate for autism is about 80%. One of the ways researchers determine this is by looking at the concordance rates of identical and fraternal twins for autism (Ii.e if one twin has autism how likely is the other twin to have it-if it's more likely that the other twin does have it in identical rather than fraternal twins then it suggests a stronger role of genetics because identical twins are more genetically alike than fraternal ones.

While I HIGHLY doubt anyone on my father's side could have been diagnosed, my father and especially his late brother (my uncle) was a stereotypical "nerd" who worked with computers all day long and other than at family dinners, never saw him away from a computer(s) even in the mid 80s. My father is obsessed with computers and I'm sure my uncle was too. It probably contributed to his early death but he never had the sensory issues to my knowledge and at least got married and had kids. My paternal Grandfather could be called Aspie on the surface but in reality he was just a mean, grumpy old man who was probably abusive as well.

I'm the mutant of the (extended) family. Not only am I the only Aspie but the only one who doesn't wear or need glasses and the only one who's above average height (well over it at 6'6"). That's probably why I was treated like the black sheep of the family. I swear if I didn't look like both my parents I would start to wonder who my real family was

I believe autism is genetic. That is why we SHOULD reproduce. That is why we do need to actively and radically make changes for the next generations of Autistics.

Note for the unwary: the thread is four years old and has been revived.

We know autism has a genetic component, but is not completely explained by genetics. Studies have shown that if one twin has it, their identical twin is more likely to share it with them than their non-identical twin. However, identical twins do not always share it.

not denying the genetic component part....though am not sure there is always such a part, as I believe a severely abused child could become autistic, but re twin studies, they are fascinatingly problematic...

http://healthland.time.com/2013/03/21/s ... th-autism/

A lot of people do not know how to interpret data in studies, and a lot of people who make various studies slant, omit, hide or fudge data when giving the results, and I think that some people do this is common knowledge.. Saying there are this or that kind of studies that support this or that premise does not give much evidence about much of anything.

The above link takes us to a study that slants or omits certain material that would obviously be relevant to the conclusion being drawn in the synopsis. See if you can spot any flaws or ommissions of significant data that could lead to a certain false conclusion being drawn. (I just found this about five minutes ago and have not read the actual study which I do not know if I could even find....

I've had this same question.

There's so much bad statistical work in science these days. My brother-in-law and I once talked about the famous "twins study," and I pointed out that when you cast that big a net, even random data will contain big blocs of similarity. I was running a QA lab back then, so I had to deal with mildly complex statistics every day. Unlike academics, we were usually dealing with problems where mistakes would be obvious within six months (like a defective part idling a $4 billion wafer fab, which gets customers pretty mad, and would've gotten me fired). I was willing to bet that if I took two sequences of bits from a good hardware random number generator, each long enough to be comparable to what the twins-study looked at, I'd find similar sub-sequences in corresponding locations on both strings.

Bro had an even better observation: he'd seen a woman at a distance who looked almost like his mom. She was wearing just the sort of clothing and jewelry that his mom would wear, so the similarity was almost unsettling. That's probably because it looked good on her, for the same reason that it looked good on his mom (and not for a more elaborate genetic reason). So when they say "Eureka! Genetic twins (who look identical) wear the same clothes/play the same sports/whatever," the correct response is "so what?"

A lot of people who aren't cut out to be scientists still need to publish. ASD research seems full of that.

Their statistics are like European imperialists' conclusions from measurements of the cranial diameters of Africans. They found them to be smaller, and concluded from that that Africans were genetically stupid. It couldn't possibly be malnutrition, could it? Or a developmental difference in hot climates? Or that the big, wily ones were harder to catch? Naw. It's gotta be that they're congenitally STOOOOOPID. 'Cuz I'm a scientist. And I said so.

Why would investigators leap to that conclusion other than to soothe their own insecurities? What you're really measuring with the modern counterpart is the insecurity of beneficiaries of Vietnam-era grade inflation.

On a more serious note, psych has worse problems. From page one of Claude Bernard's Introduction to The Study of Experimental Medicine"

"[E]xperimental medicine must include three basic parts: physiology, pathology and therapeutics. Knowledge of causes of the phenomena of life in the normal state, i.e., PHYSIOLOGY, will teach us to maintain normal conditions of life and to conserve HEALTH. Knowledge of diseases and of their determining causes, i.e., PATHOLOGY, will lead us, on the one hand, to prevent the development of morbid conditions, and, on the other, to fight their results with medical agents, i.e., to cure the diseases."

See the problem? We still use "normal range" to define the physiology. Would we do that with body fat? Aerobic performance? I bet not. Even Bernard includes health in his definition. Until they have something better than that, they're stuck in an early-1600s thinking style.

Even if the statistics weren't bad enough to make Fermi or Maxwell roll over in their graves, we aren't looking at a real science until we define our terms in a non-psychologically-defective way.

Thanks for this. You explained it very well, though I had a little difficulty understanding some of it until now, perhaps because I have some kind of brain damage and/or add, though ti must be noted that I have no difficulty at all understanding my own perfectly clear to me, but to some others, very convoluted messages. But now I see your message hits the nail on the head very perfectly. The one thing I would like to add to is your last point. I think there always will be a slant in that subjective perspectives and also trends and tendencies in society will affect which material is funded. And yes, it is not just twin studies that are flawed, but many kinds of studies.

I think a person has as much of a chance or probably even more of a chance to find out about autism by studying himself, Of course such a study would surely also be biased, but maybe there is a way to approach that kind of soft science more objectively. One fascinating to me about WP is that I do not see many people approaching from this angle of self study. I think I said something in this message I wrote yesterday but did not post. Here is the message:

Hi. I did not post on this thread for a few days because the subject matter is so important to me that I needed to stop and think about the best way to express certain concepts in order to unfold an explanation of what I think may actually be behind the phenomena of autism, so what combinations of factors may be causing it, and since it seems my intent which is actually extremely benevolent is being misunderstood here by some, I want to go slow, and also there has been some indication that I am not expressing things in such a way that I am that easily understood.

Re the twin studies: First, I did google this on Sunday, and there is readily available all kinds of material going into the flaws of these studies, but I have not looked at even one article, though I may sometime, as it is extremely obvious to me at first glance that these twin studies are in certain significant ways flawed.

One thing is that various researchers need to keep generating income because, after all, it is their profession, and from what I have seen, geneticists tend to rely on twin studies, perhaps because there is not too much else to rely on, and it is interesting to me that some people are making such a big fuss about there not being someone who is autistic on the board of Autism Speaks, and yet they are so ready, willing and able to accept the pronouncement of various scientists about the possible genetic origins of their own autism.

I have looked at some of these studies about autistic brain function which are not even twin studies, and there is a kind of limited gist to each individual study, of course, but people (meaning the so-called scientists behind these studies) are interpreting their own studies and jumping to all kinds of conclusions based on what seems to me to be very limited information.

There are many different ways to interpret the same data, some of which interpretations involve leaving out various aspects of this data...and this is a part of making various interpretations, but when you are trying to prove something, it is only natural to slant interpretations in your own mind in a certain direction and then tend to look at the material from that angle. Okay, well this is just how life is---people tend to do this, but the main point here is that many people will easily buy various interpretations, especially if it fits in with their own profession, meaning in this sense, not professional job capacity, but who they profess themselves to be, both to themselves and others, and also, certain tends and tendencies toward interpreting data in various directions can kind of socially catch on, and not even a bad thing, necessarily---it could be for the greater good---but what we do not want to sacrifice is the individual capacity to process data actively.

Actually the latest research tells us environmental factors may play a bigger role than genetics. This would explain why we can't find any gene or combination of genes that cause a significant increase in autism, outside of some rare known disease. It is also known that some viruses cause autism.

Autism is likely the result of many factors both genetic and environmental coming together.

There are also genetic disorders that cause autism such as NF1 ( Neurofibromatosis 1), were 30-50%+ have autism. A cure for these would mean a cure for this as a cause of autism.

Thanks for posting this. It is very helpful. I think you have probably seen this recent study:

http://www.foxnews.com/health/2014/03/1 ... dy-claims/

I saw this the other day, and the way they tabulated the data seems to prove their point or, better put, point to drawing the conclusion they are making, so in this sense it is the kind of 'good' study we would be looking for in that there is a scientific approach and they do not seem to be slanting data. However, in actually understand autism, this study may have some limitations as it does not offer a completely comprehensive explanation. The limitation is that this theory does not look at human brain function from the angle of the brain function continuously adapting to the environment from many different angles, but rather looks simply from the perspective that there is a particular cause and then an effect. I think some autism may be caused by purely environmental factors and other kinds of autism may not. There is this one theory of autism called the intense mind theory which is really to me quite pristine and even brilliant and which really does seem to be approaching from a purely scientific angle, but if a person actually iIS autistic and/or has an autistic child and is looking at his own brain function, in order to use this theory to better understand his own self,and others functioning in present time, he is going to need to add something more to that which would take his own study into the area of soft science, so I think confirmation bias may be an important aspect of brain function.

Perhaps I am stretching it, but for me this is what NobodyKnows was touching on when he wrote:


If a person removes his own thinking from the thinking, then there is no thinking at all, but if he includes his own thinking in the same old way, then there is no insight but it is just kind of primitive. A third possibility would be to factor in thinking in a new way into ones old way of thinking, and this is the paradigm humanity has been struggling for many years to enter, in that there is some kind of objective reality, but it cannot exist from the perspective of the perceiving without subjective factors in some way playing into it. A paradigm shift is not easy.

I saw this documentary on Einstein and this one comment impressed me so much I wrote it down: This was when he realized his (previously rejected by himself) thoughts on the orbit of mercury explaining his theory of gravity actually did explain it:

Totally fascinating.

I believe that my autism is hereditary. I have also noticed that many of us did grow up in grotesquely dysfunctional families. I DO NOT believe that these families either caused my autism or made me more Autistic. [but I also do not consider being autistic a bad thing] I do believe that in a violently cruel family, if there is a member who is Autistic, that person will be the most likely scapegoat. I also believe that being horrifically abused will make dealing with the "real world" substantially more difficult, whether NT or Autistic. I believe being Autistic makes it even more difficult because it's not only our parents who are nuts, but, to a lesser degree the entire NT culture.

I do not believe that Autistics who have been grossly mistreated are any more likely to blame their difficulties in life on their upbringing than NT's who have been similarly tortured. In fact, being solution oriented, I believe that all in all, a scarred Autistic is more likely to reach out and effect positive changes to reduce this form of evil [yeah, evil]than an NT similarly scarred.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/emilywillin ... tism-risk/

In this article which I just now read for the first time, the writer covers the topic somewhat comprehensively when analyzing one particular study.

My own theory, when presented ,will explain how various psychological and sociological factors can play into autism and surely do. Note she mentions the psychological angle at the end, and this is even maybe the main point of what she is saying, but she touches on it rather skittishly, perhaps because looking from this angle is now perceived by many as being politically incorrect. Will have to read it again, though....

I think but am not sure this is the same study I posted a link to a different article about in a recent message and asked if people could see the flaw in the interpretation presented by that writer. Will have to go back to that....

It's definitely genetic. My brother has more tics than my sister, but my sister has more autistic traits than he does.