Autism with intellectual disability linked to mother's immune dysfunction during pregnancy

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2016-06/uoc--awi060716.php

Public Release: 7-Jun-2016
Autism with intellectual disability linked to mother's immune dysfunction during pregnancy
University of California - Davis Health System

Pregnant women with higher levels of inflammatory cytokines and chemokines, proteins that control communication between cells of the immune system, may be at significantly greater risk of having a child with autism combined with intellectual disability, researchers with the UC Davis MIND Institute have found.

The research also suggests a potential immune profile for the differentiation of autism combined with intellectual disability, as distinct from either autism or developmental disability alone.

"Inflammation during the second trimester in the mothers of children with autism who also have intellectual disability was significantly greater than in mothers of children autism without intellectual disability in our study," said Judy Van de Water, professor of Internal Medicine in the Division of Rheumatology, Allergy and Clinical Immunology and a researcher affiliated with the UC Davis MIND Institute.

"However, equally significant was that profiles of mothers whose children go on to be diagnosed with autism and intellectual disability differed markedly from those whose children have intellectual disability without autism, as well as from the typically developing general population," said Van de Water, director of the UC Davis Center for Children's Environmental Health and the study's senior author.

"Their profiles are distinct from all of the other groups that we studied, based on their cytokine and chemokine profiles," Van de Water continued. "This finding suggests an avenue that we will explore to potentially identify possible markers to separate sub-phenotypes in the autism population."

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