By Emily Bazelon in O the Oprah magazine:

(Newstands only; article not available on the magazine’s website.)

After her son was diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome, Gwenyth Jackaway went on the Internet in search of other women who had used the same anonymous sperm donor. She has found seven other mothers. Among them they have eleven children and one on the way. Three have diagnoses on the autism spectrum, a rate that is about 45 times higher than the chances for the general population. Bazelon spends time with the women and documents their lives.

Is the bank that sold Donor X’s sperm at fault for failing to catch the genetic defect he appears to carry? (None of the mothers of affected children has family members with autism.) No history of the disorder showed up on the three-generation medical profile that Donor X filled out for the California Cryobank. The bank conducts DNA testing for conditions like Tay-Sachs, cystic fibrosis and sickle-cell anemia, which are primarily caused by a single mutant gene.

Autism is a different story. The disorder clearly has a hereditary component (if one identical twin has it, the odds the other will, too, are between 60 and 90 percent), “but there is not a genetic test for autism because we have not yet identified enough genes that might cause it,” says Peter Szatmari, MD, a veteran autism researcher and psychiatry professor at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario.

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 16th, 2008 at 4:17 pm and is filed under Asperger's, NOT2BEMISSED, Tay-Sachs, assisted reproduction, autism, cystic fibrosis, families, genetics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.  Email This Post