Autism spectrum disorders (ASD) are an increasingly diagnosed group of neurodevelopmental disorders. Although heritability suggests a strong genetic component, efforts to identify genes involved have had disappointing results, and the difference in disease state between identical (monozygotic) twins points to a potential role for epigenetic factors. Two new studies have found a significant correlation between DNA methylation (DNAm) patterns and ASD traits. Wong et al. performed a genome-wide analysis of DNAm in a sample of 50 monozygotic twin pairs sampled from a representative population cohort that included twins discordant and concordant for ASD, ASD-associated traits and no autistic phenotype [1]. Numerous differentially methylated regions associated with ASD were identified and significant correlations between DNAm and quantitatively measured autistic trait scores were reported. Ladd-Acosta et al. examined DNAm in post-mortem brain tissue from 19 autism cases and 21 unrelated controls. Over 485 000 CpG loci were measured across a diverse set of functionally relevant genomic regions and four genome-wide significant differentially methylated regions were identified [2]. <\/p>\n
1. Wong et al<\/em>. Mol Psychiatry 2013; doi: 10.1038\/mp.2013.114 (www.nature.com\/mp\/journal\/vaop\/ncurrent\/full\/mp201341a.html<\/link>). Autism spectrum disorders (ASD) are an increasingly diagnosed group of neurodevelopmental disorders. Although heritability suggests a strong genetic component, efforts to identify genes involved have had disappointing results, and the difference in disease state between identical (monozygotic) twins points to a potential role for epigenetic factors. Two new studies have found a significant correlation between […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[35],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/clinlabint.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1775"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/clinlabint.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/clinlabint.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/clinlabint.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/clinlabint.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1775"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/clinlabint.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1775\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/clinlabint.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1775"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/clinlabint.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1775"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/clinlabint.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1775"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
2. Ladd-Acosta et al<\/em>. Mol Psychiatry 2013; doi: 10.1038\/mp.2013.114 (www.nature.com\/mp\/journal\/vaop\/ncurrent\/full\/mp2013114a.htm<\/link>).
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