Am J Psychiatry 2022 May 26:appiajp21101002. Epub 2022 May 26.
Carolina Institute for Developmental Disabilities (Girault, Forsen, Shen, Hazlett, Piven), Department of Psychiatry (Girault, Shen, Kim, Hazlett, Styner, Piven), Department of Biostatistics (Donovan, Truong), and ; Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences (Hawks) and Department of Psychiatry (Talovic, Nishino, Davis, Botteron, Todorov, Pruett, Constantino), Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis; Institute of Child Development (Elison) and Department of Psychology, School of Behavioral and Brain Sciences, University of Texas at Dallas, Richardson, Tex. (Swanson); Department of Radiology, Washington University in St. Louis (Snyder, McKinstry); Department of Speech and Hearing Science, University of Washington, Seattle (Estes, St. John); Department of Radiology, University of Washington Medical Center, Seattle (Dager); Tandon School of Engineering, New York University, New York (Gerig); Center for Autism Research, Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine, Philadelphia (Pandey, Schultz); Department of Pediatrics, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada (Zwaigenbaum).
Objective: Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is heritable, and younger siblings of ASD probands are at higher likelihood of developing ASD themselves. Prospective MRI studies of siblings report that atypical brain development precedes ASD diagnosis, although the link between brain maturation and genetic factors is unclear. Given that familial recurrence of ASD is predicted by higher levels of ASD traits in the proband, the authors investigated associations between proband ASD traits and brain development among younger siblings. Read More