Human Services News

From EurekAlert! - Breaking News:

Younger siblings of children with autism are at risk to suffer from delayed verbal, cognitive and motor development in their early childhood years.

This finding is the result of a research project carried out by a staff headed by Prof. Nurit Yirmiya and doctoral candidate Yifat Gamliel of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Dr. Marian Sigman of the University of California, Los Angeles.

After the age of four and a half, most of those children were able to close the gap between their development and that of other children of the same age who had siblings with normal development, except for some small delays in verbal abilities.

They reported finding that 30 percent of those children with older siblings with autism were found to have delayed development in the three areas studied, as opposed to only 5 percent in a comparison group (children whose siblings did not suffer from autism).

The reasons for this phenomenon, says Prof. Yirmiya, can be traced to the genetic tendency of children in the former group to carry an endophenotype of autism (an hereditary characteristic that is normally associated with some condition but is not a direct symptom of that condition).

Prof. Yirmiya said that such problems cannot be traced to an imitation of the behavior of the older sibling with autism.

Prof. Yirmiya said that follow-up work should be undertaken into the elemental school years in order to determine whether there are any problematic symptoms, such as learning difficulties, since these sometimes come to the surface at a later age.

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