Each year, the Interagency Autism Coordinating Committee (IACC) releases a list of scientific advances that represent significant progress in the field. The "2017 Summary of Advances" provides short, plain language summaries of the top research breakthroughs selected by the IACC from a pool of research articles nominated by the members.…

Recent research examining the explanations given by the public (i.e. lay beliefs) for autism spectrum disorder often reveals a reasonably accurate understanding of the biogenetic basis of the disorder. However, lay beliefs often manifest aspects of culture, and much of this work has been conducted in western cultures. In this study, 215…

Each year, the Interagency Autism Coordinating Committee (IACC) releases a list of scientific advances that represent significant progress in the field. The "2019 IACC Summary of Advances" provides short, plain language summaries of the top research breakthroughs selected by the IACC from a pool of research articles nominated by the…

Children with fragile X syndrome (FXS) face high risk for anxiety disorders, yet no studies have explored FXS as a high-risk sample for investigating early manifestations of anxiety outcomes. Negative affect is one of the most salient predictors of problem behaviors and has been associated with both anxiety and autistic outcomes in clinical and…

People with higher general cognitive ability in early life have more favourable levels of cardiovascular disease (CVD) risk factors in adulthood and CVD itself. The mechanism of these associations is not known. Here we examine whether general cognitive ability and CVD risk factors share genetic and/or environmental aetiology. In this large,…

Autism is widely believed to be a heterogeneous disorder; diagnosis is currently based solely on clinical criteria, although genetic, as well as environmental, influences are thought to be prominent factors in the etiology of most forms of autism. Our goal is to determine whether a predictive model based on single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs)…

Background: The prevalence, phenomenology aetiology and correlates of four forms of challenging behaviour in 32 children and adults with Smith-Magenis syndrome (SMS) were investigated. Methods: Cognitive assessments, questionnaires and semi-structured interviews were used to gather data on intellectual disability, verbal and physical aggression,…

Each year in the United States, an average of one to two children per 10,000 develop cancer. The etiology of most childhood cancer remains largely unknown but is likely attributable to random or induced genetic aberrations in somatic tissue. However, a subset of children develops cancer in the setting of an underlying inheritable condition…

A 3-month intervention was conducted to enhance the sequential time perception and storytelling ability of young children with hearing loss. The children were trained to arrange pictorial episodes of temporal scripts and tell the stories they created. Participants (N = 34, aged 4-7 years) were divided into 2 groups based on whether their…

This study examined the validity of the Klonoff and Landrine Illness-Belief Scale when applied to Latino college students (n = 156; 34% male, 66% female) at high risk for future diabetes onset. Principal factor analysis yielded four significant factors--emotional, folk beliefs, punitive, gene/hereditary--which accounted for 64.5% of variance and…

Using a genetic design of 840 60-month-old twins, this study investigated the genetic and environmental contributions to (a) individual differences in four components of cognitive school readiness, (b) the general ability underlying these four components, and (c) the predictive association between school readiness and school achievement. Results…

The heritability of substance dependence (SD) liability is based on polymorphisms at the genes that are likely to be related to the function of the central nervous system. We have recently shown an association between the dopamine D5 receptor gene and SD liability. We report herein a replication of this association in an independent case-control…

A study assessed genetic and environmental etiologies of reading, rapid naming (RN), and their covariation using data from 587 twin pairs (ages 7-20) in which one student had reading difficulties and from 360 control pairs. Correlation between reading and RN performances for subjects was significantly higher than that of controls. (Contains…

Composite reading performance data from 223 pairs of identical twins and 169 same-gender fraternal twins in which at least one member was classified with reading disability were subjected to multiple regression analysis. Results indicated that the genetic etiology of reading disability differs as a linear function of IQ. (Contains extensive…

Genetic and environmental etiologies of individual differences in tests of intelligence and school achievement were investigated in a study from the Colorado Adoption Project. A multivariate conditional path model was fitted to general cognitive ability and reading performance data from 119 adoptive and 120 nonadoptive families. (SLD)