The Heritability of Autism Spectrum Disorder
Studies have found that autism spectrum disorder (ASD) aggregates in families, and twin studies estimate the proportion of the phenotype variance due to genetic factors (heritability) to be about 90%.1
In a previous study,2 ASD heritability was estimated to be 0.50, and shared familial environmental influences to be 0.04. To define presence or absence of ASD, the study used a data set created to take into account time-to-event effects in the data, which may have reduced the heritability estimates
(detailed explanation in Figure). Using the same underlying data as in the previous study,2
we used an alternate method (used by previous studies in the field) to define concordant and discordant sibling pairs to calculate the heritability of ASD