The Sex ratio

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Many claim here that the real gender ratio of AS is 1:1 and that's the official gender ratio difference (~4:1) of AS is only due to the fact that girls are more expected to behave in a way in society that make their odd behavior less likely to be noticed by parents. "So many aspie girls grow unnoticeable" , there are more "hidden aspies girls than guys" , I keep hearing similar stuff.

I checked my local autism center , and even here there are more autistic boys than girls. So the difference is not related to culture.

The wiki entry about this matter reads:

The one thing that is certain is that our ignorance far exceeds our knowledge at this point.

Tony Attwood finds a 4:1 M:F ratio in children but 2:1 in adults, and makes some guesses about why. Assuming there is some gender bias, a 1:1 ratio is plausible.

There are certainly gender-based neurological differences, and most Asperger's research has been done on boys, so some girls may have patterns that have not been identified yet.

Your comment about the LFA ratio is very interesting.

But my question is: Why does it matter if the ratio is 1:1 or 4:1?

I think you're right, that AS is more prevalent in boys.

What is the ratio on WP?

Although, I do think it's easier for girls to slip through the net because we fake it better.

People often accuse me of being shy.

But, I still make friends because certain types of people are kind of magnetised to my unusualness!

AS is very different in girls.

Boys are generally more vulnerable to mental retardation, so a higher incidence of LFA among boys is expected. That does not mean that non-retarded AS/HFAs have a skewed gender ratio.

As for what Wikipedia says about ASCs, I couldn't care less. The article has been taken over by extremists that view ASCs only as a disorder.

1- There are are more boys with LFA than girls, parents might not notice AS in children, but it's impossible to not notice LFA/classic/severe autism in their children, so it is very unlikely to have 'hidden severe autistic girls". You people here claim that AS and Autism are on the same ASD spectrum , if so ,then why they won't have similar gender ratios?

This one seems like the clincher, unless a girl in an institution is more likely to be diagnosed with some form of schizophrenia or retardation while a boy with the same symptoms is more likely to be diagnosed as autistic.

Well, following a bit of a genetic thing, males have the XY chromosome set, females are XX. Its been proven in genetics that that vast majority of conditions follow the X chromosome. Thats why its more prevalent in males since we only have the 1 X. Females wont usually show a condition unless its X dominant or X recessive. So, from this point of view, Autism is likely an X recessive trait (also called X - Linked or Sex Linked). This would mean that if a woman's family has a history of the condition (and she happens to have 1 X-recessive Autism trait) and she marries and has children with an autistic male, there is a 50% chance that a daughter will have autism, and the same chance for son.

__|_X_|_X_|
X | XX | XX |
Y | XY | XY |

Just use this basic display, marking the Autism trait to an X only (denote as Xr or Xa, etc.). What you will see is that a woman without the trait, and a father who has it: Sons will not inherit the trait, but daughters will become carriers. If a mother has the condition (say she's XaXa) and a father who isnt: Sons have a 100% chance of autism, but daughters become carriers. Now, i support this idea, but something came to me. There is an autistic woman (Liane Holliday Willey, also an Aspie and author of "Pretending to be Normal") who has a son and twin daughters. The son and the first twin daughter are fine, but the other twin has the condition. With this, and its quite possible, the recessive trait responsible for autism could be environmentally triggered, since the second twin had a difficult birth. With that in mind, i think that the autism spectrum is our evolutionary defense to prevent or decrease the chances of severe mental handicaps early in life/development. With that in mind, you could praise your "condition" for saving your life. Thoughts, or other observations?

The diagnosis of autism with girls could be shifted toward other disabilities... maybe in girls it would be more borderline or other diagnoses?

And the genetic pattern is probably not an easy one.
Especially when you take something like 'epigenetics' into the picture (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epigenetics)

But you made an interesting point LPP.

I think going to wikipedia as a source is ill-advised no matter what the topic.

since autism has been considered a male disease, it wouldn't surprise me at all if a lot of LFA girls were mis-dx'd, but the bottom line is we just don't know because there's not enough data.

speaking of gender-based diseases, why have women always been dx'd with hysteria more often than men? my personal opinion is that it was and is convenient to diagnose someone as having a neurosis than as having a neurological disorder if they don't present as having something familiar. if girls present differently than the studies on boys indicate, it's very likely they'll be given a different dx and might live with it most of their lives.

The only conditions that follow a simple inheritance pattern are genetically simple. For instance, hemophilia. A condition such as AS that likely has a locus of genes involved and may be affected by epigenetic factors as well will not follow a simple inheritance pattern.

In other words, one of a pair of identical twins can have autism and the other not, as also happens with conditions like schizophrenia.

The sex ratio for AS and classical autism should not be surprising. Few if any neurological or psychiatric conditions show a simple 1:1 ratio. From personality disorders (anti-social personality disorder is predominantly found in males, borderline personality disorder in females) to anxiety disorders (anorexia nervosa mostly found in women) to purely neurological conditions such as Tourettes (more common in boys), the ratio is not 1:1. Whether the X chromosome, hormones and the effects they have on neurology and brain formation, or other factors are at work remains to be discovered.

Personally, I think the vaste majority of the Aspie girls are (mis)diagnosed with social phobia instead. This is both because social phobia is heavily correlated to ASCs and because we see a skewed gender ratio in the opposite direction for social phobia.