Time to give up on a single explanation for Autism
SEPTEMBER 28, 2006
A major opinion piece authored by the Institute of Psychiatry’s Happe, Ronald and Plomin has been published on line in the journal Nature and Neuroscience, one of the Nature Publishing key scientific journals.
Over the years, many hypotheses have been proposed to explain the central deficits in autism, but no proposal has successfully accounted for all of the symptoms. In this article, Francesca Happé, Angelica Ronald and Robert Plomin argue that no single defect is likely to explain the core symptoms because autism consists of a constellation of traits found (in less extreme form) in the normal population as well and inherited largely independently of each other.