A Genetic Multimutation Model of Autism Spectrum Disorder Fits Disparate Twin Concordance Data from the USA and Canada.

Whether autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is caused by genetics, environmental factors, or a combination of both is still being debated today. To help resolve this issue, a genetic multimutation model of ASD development was applied to a wide variety of age-of-onset data from the USA and Canada, and the model is shown to fit all the data. Included in this analysis is new, updated data from the Interactive Autism Network (IAN) of the Kennedy Krieger Institute in Baltimore, Maryland.

A Novel Model of Schizophrenia Age-of-Onset Data Challenges the Conventional Interpretations of the Discordance in Monozygote Twin Studies.

The relative importance of genetics and the environment in causing schizophrenia is still being debated. Although the high proportion of monozygote cotwins of schizophrenia patients who are discordant suggests that there may be a significant environmental contribution to the development of schizophrenia, this discordance is predicted by an accumulative multimutation model of schizophrenia onset constructed here implying a genetic origin of schizophrenia. In this model, schizophrenics are viewed as having been born with the genetic susceptibility to develop schizophrenia.

Calculating the number of people with Alzheimer's disease in any country using saturated mutation models of brain cell loss that also predict widespread natural immunity to the disease.

The series of mutations that cause brain cells to spontaneously and randomly die leading to Alzheimer's disease (AD) is modelled. The prevalence of AD as a function of age in males and females is calculated from two very different mutation models of brain cell death. Once the prevalence functions are determined, the number of people with AD in any country or city can be estimated.