A team of researchers at CHU Sainte-Justine and Université de Montréal has succeeded in using bioinformatics to develop a statistical model to assess how the gain or loss of genetic material impacts the risk of autism.

The results of this work are presented today in the American Journal of Psychiatry.

This project highlights the fact that, besides the genetic mutations formally associated with autism, there are thousands of genes in the human genome that contribute to increasing the risk and severity of autism based on genetic scores.