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?
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.
Jenny Butterfly said:Since my own diagnosis I can see quite clearly that many of them were/are autistic too
Yes - me too - I strongly suspect my (late) mum and her (long dead) dad.