Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is one phenotypic aspect of many monogenic, hereditary cancer syndromes. Pleiotropic effects of cancer genes on the autism phenotype could lead to repurposing of oncology medications to treat this increasingly prevalent neurodevelopmental condition for which there is currently no treatment. To explore this hypothesis we sought to discover whether autistic patients more often have rare coding, single-nucleotide variants within tumor suppressor and oncogenes and whether autistic patients are more often diagnosed with neoplasms. Exome-sequencing data from the ARRA Autism Sequencing Collaboration was compared to that of a control cohort from the Exome Variant Server database revealing that rare, coding variants within oncogenes were enriched for in the ARRA ASD cohort (p<1.0 x 10(-8)). In contrast, variants were not significantly enriched in tumor suppressor genes. Phenotypically, children and adults with ASD exhibited a protective effect against cancer, with a frequency of 1.3% vs. 3.9% (p<0.001), but the protective effect decreased with age. The odds ratio of neoplasm for those with ASD relative to controls was 0.06 (95% CI: 0.02, 0.19; p<0.0001) in the 0 to 14 age group; 0.35 (95% CI: 0.14, 0.87; p = 0.024) in the 15 to 29 age group; 0.41 (95% CI: 0.15, 1.17; p = 0.095) in the 30 to 54 age group; and 0.49 (95% CI: 0.14, 1.74; p = 0.267) in those 55 and older. Both males and females demonstrated the protective effect. These findings suggest that defects in cellular proliferation, and potentially senescence, might influence both autism and neoplasm, and already approved drugs targeting oncogenic pathways might also have therapeutic value for treating autism.
Pubmed ID: 26934580 RIS Download
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The goal of the project is to discover novel genes and mechanisms contributing to heart, lung and blood disorders by pioneering the application of next-generation sequencing of the protein coding regions of the human genome across diverse, richly-phenotyped populations and to share these datasets and findings with the scientific community to extend and enrich the diagnosis, management and treatment of heart, lung and blood disorders. The groups participating and collaborating in the NHLBI GO ESP include: Seattle GO - University of Washington, Seattle, WA Broad GO - Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, Cambridge, MA WHISP GO - Ohio State University Medical Center, Columbus, OH Lung GO - University of Washington, Seattle, WA WashU GO - Washington University, St. Louis, MO Heart GO - University of Virginia Health System, Charlottesville, VA ChargeS GO - University of Texas Health Sciences Center at Houston
View all literature mentionsGenetic variant annotation and effect prediction software toolbox that annotates and predicts effects of variants on genes (such as amino acid changes). By using standards, such as VCF, SnpEff makes it easy to integrate with other programs.
View all literature mentionsTHIS RESOURCE IS NO LONGER IN SERVICE, documented August 19, 2015. The CancerGenes resource simplifies the process of gene selection and prioritization in large collaborative projects. CancerGenes combines gene lists annotated by experts with information from key public databases. Gene lists in the CancerGenes resource are from various sources and have been mapped to UCSC canonical gene IDs. Each gene is annotated with gene name(s), functional description, organism, chromosome number, location, Entrez Gene ID, GO terms, InterPro descriptions, gene structure, protein length, transcript count, and experimentally determined transcript control regions, as well as links to Entrez Gene, COSMIC, and iHOP gene pages and the UCSC and Ensembl genome browsers. The user-friendly interface provides for searching, sorting and intersection of gene lists. Users may view tabulated results through a web browser or may dynamically download them as a spreadsheet table.
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