Abstract
Autistic traits—social impairment, communication impairment, and restricted and repetitive behaviors and interests—are heritable in the general population. Previous analyses have consistently reported limited genetic and environmental overlap between autistic trait domains in samples assessed in middle childhood. Here we extend this research to parent-report data for 12-year-olds. Data from 5,944 pairs in the Twins Early Development Study were analyzed to explore the domain-specific heritability and degree of shared genetic and environmental influences across different autistic traits in the general population and among individuals scoring in the top 5% of each domain. Sex differences in the etiological estimates were also tested in these analyses. Autistic traits were moderately to highly heritable (0.58–0.88) at age 12. Bivariate genetic correlations in the full sample (0.18–0.40) and the extremes (0.24–0.67), as well as even lower unique environmental correlations, all suggested considerable fractionation of genetic and environmental influences across autistic trait domains, in line with previous findings.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
APA (1994) Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders. American Psychiatric Association, Washington
Bailey A, Le Couteur A, Gottesman I, Bolton P, Simonoff E, Yuzda E, Rutter M (1995) Autism as a strongly genetic disorder: evidence from a British twin study. Psychol Med 25(1):63–77
Bertrand J, Mars A, Boyle C, Bove F, Yeargin-Allsopp M, Decoufle P (2001) Prevalence of autism in a United States populations: the Brick Township, New Jersey, investigation. Pediatrics 108:1155–1161
Chakrabarti S, Fombonne E (2001) Pervasive developmental disorders in preschool children. JAMA 285:3093–3099
Constantino JN, Todd RD (2003) Autistic traits in the general population: a twin study. Arch Gen Psychiatry 60(5):524–530
Constantino JN, Todd RD (2005) Intergenerational transmission of subthreshold autistic traits in the general population. Biol Psychiatry 57(6):655–660
Constantino JN, Przybeck T, Friesen D, Todd RD (2000) Reciprocal social behavior in children with and without pervasive developmental disorders. J Dev Behav Pediatr 21(1):2–11
Constantino J, Gruber C, Davis S, Hayes S, Passanante N, Przybeck T (2004) The factor structure of autistic traits. J Child Psychol Psychiatry 45(4):719–726
DeFries JC, Fulker DW (1985) Multiple regression analysis of twin data. Behav Genet 15(5):467–473
DeFries JC, Fulker DW (1988) Multiple regression analysis of twin data: etiology of deviant scores versus individual differences. Acta Genet Med Gemellol (Roma) 37(3–4):205–216
Dworzynski K, Happe F, Bolton P, Ronald A (2009) Relationship between symptom domains in autism spectrum disorders: a population based twin study. J Autism Dev Disord 39(8):1197–1210
Field A (2002) Discovering statistics using SPSS for Windows. Sage, London
Folstein S, Rutter M (1977) Infantile autism: a genetic study of 21 twin pairs. J Child Psychol Psychiatry 18(4):297–321
Fombonne E (2003) Epidemiological surveys of autism and other pervasive developmental disorders: an update. J Autism Dev Disord 33(4):365–382
Fombonne E (2005) Epidemiologic studies of pervasive developmental disorders. In: Volkmar F, Paul R, Klin A, Cohen P (eds) Handbook of autism and pervasive developmental disorders. Wiley, Hoboken, pp 42–69
Fox J (1997) Applied regression analysis, linear models, and related methods. Sage, Thousand Oaks
Gilman SR, Iossifov I, Levy D, Ronemus M, Wigler M, Vitkup D (2011) Rare de novo variants associated with autism implicate a large functional network of genes involved in formation and function of synapses. Neuron 70(5):898–907
Goodman R, Ford T, Richards H, Gatward R, Meltzer H (2000) The development and well-being assessment: description and initial validation of an integrated assessment of child and adolescent psychopathology. J Child Psychol Psychiatry 41(5):645–655
Happé F, Ronald A (2008) The ‘fractionable autism triad’: a review of evidence from behavioural, genetic, cognitive and neural research. Neuropsychol Rev 18(4):287–304
Happé F, Ronald A, Plomin R (2006) Time to give up on a single explanation for autism. Nat Neurosci 9(10):1218–1220
Hoekstra RA, Bartels M, Verweij CJ, Boomsma DI (2007) Heritability of autistic traits in the general population. Arch Pediatr Adolesc Med 161(4):372–377
Knopik VS, Alarcon M, DeFries JC (1997) Comorbidity of mathematics and reading deficits: evidence for a genetic etiology. Behav Genet 27(5):447–453
Levy D, Ronemus M, Yamrom B, Lee YH, Leotta A, Kendall J, Marks S, Lakshmi B, Pai D, Ye K, Buja A, Krieger A, Yoon S, Troge J, Rodgers L, Iossifov I, Wigler M (2011) Rare de novo and transmitted copy-number variation in autistic spectrum disorders. Neuron 70(5):886–897
Light JG, DeFries JC (1995) Comorbidity of reading and mathematics disabilities: genetic and environmental etiologies. J Learn Disabil 28(2):96–106
Liu XQ, Georgiades S, Duku E, Thompson A, Devlin B, Cook EH, Wijsman EM, Paterson AD, Szatmari P (2011) Identification of genetic Loci underlying the phenotypic constructs of autism spectrum disorders. J Am Acad Child Adolesc Psychiatry 50(7):687–696 e613
Lynch M, Walsh B (1998) Genetics and analysis of quantitative traits. Sinauer Associates, Sunderland
Mazefsky CA, Goin-Kochel RP, Riley BP, Maes HH (2008) Genetic and environmental influences on symptom domains in twins and siblings with autism. Res Autism Spectr Disord 2(2):320–331
Neale M (1997) Mx: statistical modeling. Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond
Neale MC, Roysamb E, Jacobson K (2006) Multivariate genetic analysis of sex limitation and G × E interaction. Twin Res Hum Genet 9(4):481–489
Office for National Statistics (2005) Mental health of children and young people living in Great Britain, 2004. The Stationery Office, London
Oliver BR, Plomin R (2007) Twins’ early development study (TEDS): a multivariate, longitudinal genetic investigation of language, cognition and behavior problems from childhood through adolescence. Twin Res Hum Genet 10(1):96–105
Plomin R, DeFries JC, McClearn GE, McGuffin P (2008) Behavioral genetics. Worth, New York
Price TS, Freeman B, Craig I, Petrill SA, Ebersole L, Plomin R (2000) Infant zygosity can be assigned by parental report questionnaire data. Twin Res 3(3):129–133
Purcell S, Sham PC (2003) A model-fitting implementation of the DeFries–Fulker model for selected twin data. Behav Genet 33(3):271–278
Robinson EB, Munir K, Munafo MR, Hughes M, McCormick MC, Koenen KC (2011) Stability of autistic traits in the general population: further evidence for a continuum of impairment. J Am Acad Child Adolesc Psychiatry 50(4):376–384
Ronald A, Hoekstra RA (2011) Autism spectrum disorders and autistic traits: a decade of new twin studies. Am J Med Genet B Neuropsychiatr Genet 156B(3):255–274
Ronald A, Happé F, Plomin R (2005) The genetic relationship between individual differences in social and nonsocial behaviours characteristic of autism. Dev Sci 8(5):444–458
Ronald A, Happé F, Price TS, Baron-Cohen S, Plomin R (2006a) Phenotypic and genetic overlap between autistic traits at the extremes of the general population. J Am Acad Child Adolesc Psychiatry 45(10):1206–1214
Ronald A, Happé F, Bolton P, Butcher LM, Price TS, Wheelwright S, Baron-Cohen S, Plomin R (2006b) Genetic heterogeneity between the three components of the autism spectrum: a twin study. J Am Acad Child Adolesc Psychiatry 45(6):691–699
Ronald A, Happé F, Plomin R (2008) A twin study investigating the genetic and environmental aetiologies of parent, teacher and child ratings of autistic-like traits and their overlap. Eur Child Adolesc Psychiatry 17(8):473–483
Ronald A, Butcher LM, Docherty S, Davis OS, Schalkwyk LC, Craig IW, Plomin R (2010) A genome-wide association study of social and non-social autistic-like traits in the general population using pooled DNA, 500 K SNP microarrays and both community and diagnosed autism replication samples. Behav Genet 40(1):31–45
Ronald A, Larsson H, Anckarsater H, Lichtenstein P (2011) A twin study of autism symptoms in Sweden. Mol Psychiatry (in press)
Rutter M, Silberg J, O’Connor T, Simonoff E (1999) Genetics and child psychiatry: II. Empirical research findings. J Child Psychol Psychiatry 40(1):19–55
Scott FJ, Baron-Cohen S, Bolton P, Brayne C (2002) The CAST (childhood Asperger syndrome test): preliminary development of a UK screen for mainstream primary-school-age children. Autism 6(1):9–31
Scourfield J, Martin N, Lewis G, McGuffin P (1999) Heritability of social cognitive skills in children and adolescents. Br J Psychiatry 175:559–564
Skuse DH, Mandy WP, Scourfield J (2005) Measuring autistic traits: heritability, reliability and validity of the social and communication disorders checklist. Br J Psychiatry 187:568–572
St Pourcain B, Wang K, Glessner JT, Golding J, Steer C, Ring SM, Skuse DH, Grant SF, Hakonarson H, Davey Smith G (2010) Association between a high-risk autism locus on 5p14 and social communication spectrum phenotypes in the general population. Am J Psychiatry 167(11):1364–1372
Steffenburg S, Gillberg C, Hellgren L, Andersson L, Gillberg IC, Jakobsson G, Bohman M (1989) A twin study of autism in Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden. J Child Psychol Psychiatry 30(3):405–416
Stevenson J, Pennington BF, Gilger JW, DeFries JC, Gillis JJ (1993) Hyperactivity and spelling disability: testing for shared genetic aetiology. J Child Psychol Psychiatry 34(7):1137–1152
Williams J, Scott F, Stott C, Allison C, Bolton P, Baron-Cohen S, Brayne C (2005) The CAST (childhood Asperger syndrome test): test accuracy. Autism 9(1):45–68
Yeargin-Allsopp M, Rice C, Karapurkar T, Doernberg N, Boyle C, Murphy C (2003) Prevalence of autism in a US metropolitan area. J Am Med Assoc 289:49–55
Acknowledgments
The TEDS is funded by MRC grant G0500079 and has IRB approval. The research was specifically funded by a National Institute of Mental Health/NIH Research Fellowship in Mental Health and Developmental Disabilities (MH/DD) at The Children’s Hospital Boston, Harvard Medical School (MH71286) and the Training Program in Psychiatric Genetics and Translational Research at the Harvard School of Public Health (T32MH017119).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Additional information
Edited by Yoon-Mi Hur.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Robinson, E.B., Koenen, K.C., McCormick, M.C. et al. A Multivariate Twin Study of Autistic Traits in 12-Year-Olds: Testing the Fractionable Autism Triad Hypothesis. Behav Genet 42, 245–255 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10519-011-9500-3
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10519-011-9500-3