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A comment on It all made sense when we found out we were autistic. Parent comment

Re:It all made sense when we found out we were autistic by TomK32 on Monday March 26, 2018 @04:16PM (#16682133)
Thanks for the Autism rights movement link (here I am, an old-fashioned wikipedian of 15 years and still finding new articles).

I though Autism/Asperger has some genetic backing? At least the wikipedia article I link below has quite a list of candidate gene loci.

Here's a quote from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritability_of_autism

> Autism concordance in siblings and fraternal twins is anywhere between 0 and 23.5%. This is more likely 2–4% for classic autism and 10–20% for a broader spectrum. Assuming a general-population prevalence of 0.1%, the risk of classic autism in siblings is 20- to 40-fold that of the general population.

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Re:It all made sense when we found out we were autistic by goldenkey on Monday March 26, 2018 @04:20PM (#16682167)
We know many cases are genetic but don't have a definitive genetic test.

Heritibility is not hard to determine even if no specific genes are known. Mendel did this with plants even before chromosomes were discovered. So we can say simple things like the odds of offspring having autism - which isn't based on a specific gene but rather the dominance/recessiveness of the underlying genetic factors computed by census/survey/sampling data.

So yes, there is a genetic disease that causes neurological changes, autism - but it isn't correct to label all inward children as having that gene. Symptomatic diseases can have multiple disparate genetic causes - and we usually separate these into different diseases even if the symptoms are extremely similar.

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Re:It all made sense when we found out we were autistic by AstralStorm on Thursday March 29, 2018 @04:47AM (#16705511)
The percentages are confounded by the environment both social and physical fostered by parents. And we don't have enough separated twin studies...
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Re:It all made sense when we found out we were autistic by goldenkey on Thursday March 29, 2018 @07:43AM (#16706178)
You're right. I was just trying to tell OP that the heritibility evidence we have is not from knowing the exact genes that cause autism. It is moreso from epidemiological stats.
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