(From Science Daily) Together with colleagues from an international research group, autism researcher Christopher Gillberg of the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, has found in a new study that autism can be partially explained by abnormalities in certain genes. The group’s results could, in the long run, pave the way for more appropriate treatments for autism.

Prestigious journal Nature is publishing an article co-authored by Christopher Gillberg of the Unit for Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at the Institute of Neuroscience and Physiology, and member of the Autism Genome Project (AGP) research group.

In the article the group reveals that a survey of 1,000 individuals with autism and 1,300 without showed that Copy Number Variants (CNVs) — sub-microscopic abnormalities in the chromosomes — are heavily over-represented in autistic people.

“Some of these are inherited, while others have appeared for the first time in the person with autism,” says Gillberg. “Several of the abnormalities affect the genes that we have previously shown to be linked to autism and psychological developmental disorders.”

The article stresses something that Gillberg and his colleagues have long asserted, namely that autism is partly down to a number of completely different genetic abnormalities, each of which occurs in just a small number of autistic people, but which together account for an increasing proportion of all cases, and that autism is an umbrella term for a large number of different neurobiological conditions that have the same symptom picture.

Read more here: Disturbances in Certain Genes Play a Role in Autism