Variants Associated with Autism Over-Hyped, Company Says

Genetic variations linked to autism and schizophrenia crop up in people with a large variety of conditions, including bipolar disorder, seizures and obsessive-compulsive disorder, as well as in healthy people. This notion gained new support from unpublished data presented Thursday at the World Congress for Psychiatric Genetics in San Diego.Researchers from Signature Genomics, a private clinical genetic testing company in Spokane, Washington, have found, for instance, that many children with autism inherit deletions in the 16p11.2 chromosomal region — famously linked to autism — from healthy parents with no sign of the disorder.The findings debunk previous hype that any one variant is crucial for a particular disorder, the researchers say.Read more at...SFARI, November 2009.