| 1. |
- Beggiato, Anita, et al.
(författare)
-
Gender differences in autism spectrum disorders: Divergence among specific core symptoms.
- 2017
-
Ingår i: Autism research : official journal of the International Society for Autism Research. - : Wiley. - 1939-3806 .- 1939-3792. ; 10:4, s. 680-689
-
Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Community-based studies have consistently shown a sex ratio heavily skewed towards males in autism spectrum disorders (ASD). The factors underlying this predominance of males are largely unknown, but the way girls score on standardized categorical diagnostic tools might account for the underrecognition of ASD in girls. Despite the existence of different norms for boys and girls with ASD on several major screening tests, the algorithm of the Autism Diagnosis Interview-Revised (ADI-R) has not been reformulated. The aim of our study was to investigate which ADI-R items discriminate between males and females, and to evaluate their weighting in the final diagnosis of autism. We then conducted discriminant analysis (DA) on a sample of 594 probands including 129 females with ASD, recruited by the Paris Autism Research International Sibpair (PARIS) Study. A replication analysis was run on an independent sample of 1716 probands including 338 females with ASD, recruited through the Autism Genetics Resource Exchange (AGRE) program. Entering the raw scores for all ADI-R items as independent variables, the DA correctly classified 78.9% of males and 72.9% of females (P<0.001) in the PARIS cohort, and 72.2% of males and 68.3% of females (P<0.0001) in the AGRE cohort. Among the items extracted by the stepwise DA, four belonged to the ADI-R algorithm used for the final diagnosis of ASD. In conclusion, several items of the ADI-R that are taken into account in the diagnosis of autism significantly differentiates between males and females. The potential gender bias thus induced may participate in the underestimation of the prevalence of ASD in females. Autism Res 2016,. © 2016 International Society for Autism Research, Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
|
|
| 2. |
- Chang, Hong, et al.
(författare)
-
Identification of a Bipolar Disorder Vulnerable Gene CHDH at 3p21.1.
- 2017
-
Ingår i: Molecular neurobiology. - : Springer Science and Business Media LLC. - 1559-1182 .- 0893-7648. ; 54:7, s. 5166-5176
-
Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Genome-wide analysis (GWA) is an effective strategy to discover extreme effects surpassing genome-wide significant levels in studying complex disorders; however, when sample size is limited, the true effects may fail to achieve genome-wide significance. In such case, there may be authentic results among the pools of nominal candidates, and an alternative approach is to consider nominal candidates but are replicable across different samples. Here, we found that mRNA expression of the choline dehydrogenase gene (CHDH) was uniformly upregulated in the brains of bipolar disorder (BPD) patients compared with healthy controls across different studies. Follow-up genetic analyses of CHDH variants in multiple independent clinical datasets (including 11,564 cases and 17,686 controls) identified a risk SNP rs9836592 showing consistent associations with BPD (P meta=5.72×10(-4)), and the risk allele indicated an increased CHDH expression in multiple neuronal tissues (lowest P=6.70×10(-16)). These converging results may identify a nominal but true BPD susceptibility gene CHDH. Further exploratory analysis revealed suggestive associations of rs9836592 with childhood intelligence (P=0.044) and educational attainment (P=0.0039), a "proxy phenotype" of general cognitive abilities. Intriguingly, the CHDH gene is located at chromosome 3p21.1, a risk region implicated in previous BPD genome-wide association studies (GWAS), but CHDH is lying outside of the core GWAS linkage disequilibrium (LD) region, and our studied SNP rs9836592 is ∼1.2Mb 3' downstream of the previous GWAS loci (e.g., rs2251219) with no LD between them; thus, the association observed here is unlikely a reflection of previous GWAS signals. In summary, our results imply that CHDH may play a previously unknown role in the etiology of BPD and also highlight the informative value of integrating gene expression and genetic code in advancing our understanding of its biological basis.
|
|
