Can a blood test predict if a sibling will also have autism? Researchers are hopeful this could lead to an earlier diagnosis
, there’s usually an anxious waiting period to see if the next child will develop autism, one where every developmental milestone is tracked and the often-curious behaviours of infants and toddlers scrutinized.in the general population is about 1.5 percent, but that jumps to an estimated 7 percent to 20 percent for babies who have an older sibling with autism.
“We hear from parents all the time how challenging it can be to access a diagnosis and access intervention because sometimes the early signs of autism can be quite subtle,” says Lonnie Zwaigenbaum, a professor of paediatrics at the University of Alberta.
“The sample size is too small to investigate how well a test can predict autism,” says Cecile Janssens, an epidemiologist at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, who researches the application of genomics research to health care. “If they replicate this study in a bigger group of kids, like a thousand kids or two thousand kids, the test could easily end up being more or less predictive,” she says.
Scherer and Zwaigenbaum are continuing to investigate genetic predictors of autism, and are currently leading a study that goes beyond the 15 variants and involves analyzing the whole genome in younger siblings of kids with autism. This will give a much bigger piece of the picture, as it’s estimated that hundreds of genes are involved in autism, and could increase the test’s accuracy.
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