Original articlesIntergenerational transmission of subthreshold autistic traits in the general population
Section snippets
Methods and materials
For the biological parents of 285 epidemiologically ascertained twin pairs (subjects of the ongoing Missouri Twin Study; Constantino and Todd 2003), we obtained spouse-report parent assessments (mother reporting about father and father reporting about mother) and maternal-report assessments of twins using the Social Responsiveness Scale (SRS), a quantitative measure of autistic traits (Constantino et al 2000). All of the families had been participants in a previous study (Constantino and Todd
Results
SRS scores were unrelated to parental age and were continuously distributed in both mothers and fathers (Figure 1). Intraclass correlations for pairings of family members were highly statistically significant (in all cases p < .00001): mother-daughter .41, mother-son .38, father-daughter .49, father-son .58. Intraclass correlation between mothers and fathers was .38, suggestive (at the simplest level of analysis) of the presence of assortative mating.
Figure 2 depicts variation in offspring SRS
Discussion
Data from this intergenerational study of autistic traits confirmed previous findings of substantial genetic influence on subthreshold autistic traits (Constantino and Todd 2003) and extends our heritability estimates to adults. The condition of having both parents within the top quartile of their respective distributions for degree of autistic social impairment resulted in a substantial pathologic shift in the distribution of scores for autistic social impairment in offspring, with an effect
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