The Most Heritable of All Psychiatric Conditions
December 5, 2006 by Kristina Chew, PhD
Filed under Health
“Autism is the most heritable of all psychiatric conditions, with the heritability approaching 90 percent…….. There’s room for the environment, but not a lot of room.”
So Dr. Daniel Geschwind is quoted in a December 4th article, Ped Med: Scientists study genes in autism. Geschwind is professor of neurology and psychiatry, director of the Neurogenetics Program and the Center for Autism Research and Treatment at the University of California, Los Angeles, School of Medicine and author of Microarrays for the Neurosciences (MIT Press, 2002).
A second quote, from Dr. Eileen Costello, a pediatrician at the Boston University School of Medicine and co-author of Quirky Kids (Random House, 2003):
“And almost to a family, every time I asked, ‘Where do you think this came from in your child?,’ there was something in the family history that pointed to a genetic etiology or at least a genetic component to where this came from … other neurodevelopmental disabilities, seizure disorders, ADD (attention-deficit disorder), depression, other psychiatric illnesses, other things in the family.”
“People did not say, ‘No idea. There’s never been anything like this in my family before.’”
Indeed: What happens when we start to look back at our families and see some quirkiness, some difference………..
