Archival ReportGenes Controlling Affiliative Behavior as Candidate Genes for Autism
Section snippets
Participants
To test our hypotheses on the relevance of one or more of six genes involved in control of affiliative behaviors (OXT, OXTR, PRL, PRLR, DβH, and FOSB) to ASD, we genotyped DNA from a sample of probands with autism and their families available through the Yale Child Study Center. The sample consisted of 527 participants (322 male, and 205 female), of which 177 were classified as probands (Table 1). These participants formed 151 nuclear families. Forty-one percent of the families had only one
Results
The patterns of analysis for multivariate and univariate phenotypes are quite consistent. Specifically, for multivariate analyses, the lowest p values obtained were those for PRLR (p = .000005, with the multivariate indicator of Communication Skills and rs7727306; and p = .000249, with the multivariate ADI phenotype, ADI Group and rs35614689) and PRL (p = .000085 and p = .006957, with the multivariate ADI phenotype and rs1341239 and rs1205961, respectively). The pattern of univariate results is
Discussion
A number of observations are of interest here.
First, the evidence of the involvement of the prolactin system at the genetic level is novel, although based on evidence in the literature. It is of interest and importance that both the PRL ligand and the receptor show allelic associations with ASD. This might suggest the involvement of the PRL pathway as a whole and possibly of other pathways with which PRL interacts. For example, there is evidence that stimulation by PRL of mouse mammary glands
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