Autism Spectrum Disorders and Autisticlike Traits.

The article discusses a study which examined if autism spectrum disorders (ASD) and autisticlike traits (ALT) have similar genetic or environmental etiologies. Swedish twins aged nine to 12 years are presented to have been studied using two validated ASD cutoffs, two normal variation cutoffs, and a continuous ALT measure with DeFries-Fulker extreme-end analysis. A correlation between the 4-cutoffs and the full ALT variation is cited. An etiological link between ASD and ALT is suggested.