Living with Autism: A Parent's Perspective

A Parent's look at Dealing with an Autistic Child

About this blog

Welcome to our blog. Here Michelle and I (Carl) will try over time to give you an idea of the struggles and the triumphs of raising an autistic child. He is lovable and happy most of the time but is basically nonverbal and nonsocial. He is getting better with time and a lot of effort on our part (and on his) and this journey we will try to explain as we go along

Well while I am a strong supporter of Autism having an environmental trigger, I do accept it is likely that there must be something to differentiate autistics from non autistics or such a trigger is unlikely to work.

 

So it is with some hope i saw there was new research that indicated that a missing chromosome was a clear indicator of autism or schizophrenia (well ok I was sceptical and concerned to see autism lumped with schizophrenia but we will see)

 

Then I started to look at the total numbers

 

over a total of two different databases

 

23271 people in a database of intellectual disabilities and autism and schizophrenia

total 24 of those people are missing chromosome 17
0.00103% of those on that database or assuming at a stretch that all were autistic (they weren’t) then 0.00103% of those with autism were missing chromosome 17

47595 healthy people were tested and none were missing chromosome 17

 

however of those 24 confirmed missing chromosome 17

8 were confirmed autism

4 confirmed schizophrenia

9 completely untracked

leaving 3 that were other cognitive delays also missing chromosome 17

 

I used the full 24 being autistic to give the researchers the best possible conclusion and still came up with 1 in 1000 autistics missing chromosome 17

 

so while yes it is highly likely that if someone is missing chromosome 17 they will be have either autism or schizophrenia or some other developmental delay there is to low a number within the autism grouping to consider it any form of viable measure of whether or not someone will get autism.

 

In actual fact having that chromosome missing says yes you will likely be in this grouping

but actually having the chromosome present does by no means indicate that you will not



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