Autism: Environmental factors and genes equally important

The study was jointly conducted by a team of researchers from King's College, London, Karolinska Institute in Sweden and Mount Sinai in the US.
The researchers analysed data from the total 2 million children born in Sweden between the years 1982 and 2006, of which 14,516 were diagnosed with ASD. 


The researchers also took into consideration the child's family members such as identical and non-identical twins, siblings, maternal and paternal half-siblings and cousins.

The study measured two distinct factors contributing to autism risk. One is heritability, which is attributed to genetic factors and the other is relative recurrent risk which takes into account individual risk for people having a relative with autism.

The findings show that children with siblings suffering from autism are 10 times more prone to develop autism, 3 times if they have a half-brother or sister and 2 times if they have a cousin suffering from autism. This provides sufficient grounds to researchers for assessing individual risk.

Environmental factors are divided into 'shared environments' and 'non-shared environments'. The former deals with factors shared between family members such as family socioeconomic status, while the latter consists of factors specific to the individual such as birth complications or medication during the pre and perinatal period.

In this study, factors specific to the individual, or 'non-shared environments' evolved as the main source of environmental risk to help understand Autism.

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