Published on 12, July, 2020
Suppose you have the funding and technical skills to carry out autism research (e.g., questionnaires, qualitative interviews, MRI, EEG, behavioural experiments, virtual reality, etc). What kind of research question would you like to ask? What autism question do you think is still not well known, and what would be your solution to solving it, or extend current knowledge?
I'd be interested in the genetics of autism and following it through family trees.
Especially when autistic people are less likely to be in relationships so less likely to pass their genes on.
Is it just the high-functioning auties passing on the baton?
The last big announcement of genetic research found there are many different unrelated genes and their interactions and genes that cause mutations that can or cannot result in some genes to cause or not to cause autism and basically they found dozens more questions and haven't answered any of the one's they asked.. basically it's so complex even scientists aren't sure what to make of their findings . I obviously don't understand a thing
There is a lot of genetical research going on and autistic activists and autistic scientists argue that it is disproportionate and potentially unethical. What would be the practical application of genetic research? What would be the effect on human diversity and general pull of talents and abilities if autism was genetically cleaned out?
I'm enormously interested too.
However, I think it's currently very difficult to know much about the likelihood of, say, being in a relationship, or a job or anything much as long as the samples used in the research only represent a portion of the community. If a large proportion of autistic people remain undiagnosed, the results of any research will be very skewed and unrepresentative.
As an example, my own, very large family won't show up in any research. I have lots of aunts and uncles, some now quite elderly, some deceased, and lots of cousins too. Since my own diagnosis I can see quite clearly that many of them were/are autistic too and that this has affected their lives in many ways (some of which indicate that they weren't really "high functioning" at all). I can see it spanning at least 3 generations. I wonder how many families show a similar pattern.
That's an interesting question. There have been studies showing for example siblings are more likely to have autism if another one already has autism. They are also studies showing that parents, relatives, and siblings of autistic people who don't have the diagnosis still show more autistic traits. I do wonder as well how genes like these are passed on if autistic people are less likely to be in relationships. I have been wondering, if autism might be passed through multiple gene inheritance (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polygene), such that many genes interact additively to influence a phenotypic trait. So one example might be height, i.e., tall people are more likely to have tall children, but the exact height of the child would be hard to calculate. Suppose some criteria (like autism) classifies people over a certain height e.g., 2 metres, to have a disability (not being able to walk through doors without bending over), parents who are 1.8 metres, could possibly have 2 metre children. They are also more likely to do so than 1.5 tall parents. But they themselves might not meet the criteria, even though they have traits. Not sure how much this has been studies in autism, but it would be an interesting topic.