A recent study published in the Archives of General Psychiatry shows first-degree relatives of people with autism shows that family members who do not have the disorder themselves may still have oculomotor impairments. These family members who were not on the autism spectrum tended to have trouble with eye movement tasks. They also “demonstrated executive dysfunction on neuropsychological tests, communication abnormalities, and increased rates of obsessive and compulsive behaviors, but these were independent from one another and from oculomotor impairments,” say study authors.
The hope is that finding such evidence within families will help provide more clues that will lead to future therapeutic discoveries as researchers better understand the genetic nature of autism heritability.
Source: Medscape