Speech Gene discovered!!??

Speech Gene discovered!!??
LONDON, Jan 11 (Reuters) - British scientists have identified the location of a group of genes that are responsible for autism, the Sunday Times newspaper reported.

The paper said the breakthrough could help in the search for a cure and treatment for one of the least understood of mental disorders, which was brought to international attention by the Hollywood film "Rain Man."

"The landmark research is the first indication that the condition is inherited," said the paper. "The research could also herald a pre-natal test for the handicap."

After a three-year international research project, scientists from Oxford, Newcastle and London will announce in a scientific journal in March that they have located the marker for genes that appear to be responsible for autism, the paper said.

The disorder can severely hamper communications and lead to learning difficulties and behavioural problems where a child appears to be trapped in its own world.

A tiny minority of sufferers show remarkable talents in specific fields, demonstrated by an autistic man with astonishing arithmetic powers in the movie "Rain Man."

But few sufferers have such streaks of brilliance, and families must often cope with unruly children and scant medical knowledge about the disorder.

The British research team looked at 99 families from Europe and the United States who had more than one child affected by autism in a search for similarities in their genetic makeup. Only three percent of autistic children have siblings who are also affected.

"We have found something very significant which pushes us to the next stage of analysing these genes," the paper quoted Anthony Monaco of Oxford University as saying. But he stressed: "This is phase one in a long process."

The nature of the genes would provide the key to future medical help for people with autism, he said.

REUTERS

And then another one!

By Maggie Fox, Health and Science Correspondent
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A family plagued by an inability to make themselves understood has led to the first proof of a gene controlling human speech, researchers said on Monday.

Geneticist Anthony Monaco and colleagues at Oxford University in Britain have named the gene SPEECH1. "It's definite confirmation and first evidence of a real gene involved in language development," Monaco said in a telephone interview. "It means that genes are probably heavily involved in the ability to acquire language."

Experts have long said humans are "hard-wired" to acquire language and the area of the brain involved, known as the planum temporale, has been identified. Children who get no language input -- for instance profoundly deaf children who are never taught sign language -- still make up their own languages, with grammar and sentence structure. Monaco, who also helped map the gene for muscular dystrophy, set out to see how genes might be involved in language. His team worked with a family with a history of language disorders. "They have two different language problems -- one is in articulation of speech. They are very hard to understand." The condition is known as motor dyspraxia. "It's a fancy word for not being able to get the words out and be intelligible," Monaco, who reported the findings in the journal Nature Genetics on Monday, said. "The separate problem is that their speech is very rudimentary -- it isn't developed according to the age the child should be. They don't achieve the milestones at the age they should, for instance getting tenses and grammar wrong."

The gene, tracked to chromosome seven, is a dominant gene, meaning that people only have to inherit one copy to be affected. Males and females are equally affected by it. Probably by coincidence, it is near the gene known to cause cystic fibrosis when mutated. Now Monaco's team is looking to see if there is a mutation of the gene, or perhaps a deletion in which large pieces of genetic matter are simply missing. The effects are particularly strong in this one British family, but Monaco said speech disorders like theirs, on a smaller scale, affect up to 2 percent of school children. "What we hope is if we can understand the gene it can tell us more about the process on which language is built," he said.

Monaco is doing a larger study with 100 families whose members have speech disorders. He suspects there could be a link with autism, which causes victims to withdraw, and dyslexia, which causes people to have trouble reading. "Lots of children with language problems go on to have reading problems," he said. "We just did a screen for autism and to our surprise we found the same region of chromosome seven."

This might not mean anything but the researchers were checking further, Monaco said.

REUTERS

Added by Kat Moncol on January 27, 1998 at 10:18