Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry
New researchAutism in Fragile X Syndrome: A Category Mistake?
Section snippets
Subjects
Participants were 120 children, adolescents, and young adults (47 girls and 73 boys) aged 5 to 25 years. The mean ages of the boys and girls were 13.24 (SD = 3.27) years and 13.47 (SD = 4.6) years, respectively. A total of 60 (50%) participants had taken part in a previous study investigating the association between autistic, self-injurious, and compulsive behaviors in FXS.42 Participants had been diagnosed with the full mutation associated with FXS (>200 CGG repeats and evidence of aberrant
Results
As expected with an X-linked genetic disorder, IQ scores were significantly higher in girls with FXS (mean = 76.77, SD = 22.76, range = 40–116) than in boys with FXS (mean = 45.66, SD = 7.94, range = 40–74) [t(118) = 10.78, p < 0.001] and FMRP values were significantly higher in girls (mean = 53.02, SD = 18.59, range = 14.5–90) than in boys (mean = 13.91, SD = 14.42, range = 1.5–74) [t(118) = 12.67, p < 0.001]. Total scores on the SCQ were significantly higher in boys (mean = 17.14, SD = 6.74,
Discussion
The first aim of this study was to examine the prevalence of autistic behaviors in individuals with FXS. To accomplish this objective, we administered two well-known measures of autistic behaviors to a large sample of individuals with FXS. Both of these instruments are widely used in the autism literature; the SCQ is a checklist that parallels ADI-R content, whereas the ADOS is an observational measure of autistic behaviors that is often considered the “gold-standard” in autism research.
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Cited by (0)
This research was supported by National Institute of Mental Health grants MH50047 and MH01142 and the Canel Fragile X Family Fund.
Disclosure: Drs. Hall, Lightbody, and Reiss, and Ms. Hirt and Ms. Rezvani report no biomedical financial interests or potential conflicts of interest.