Rethinking Research Methods
The prevalence of developmental disorders such as autism or ADHD is higher in boys, while other conditions, such as anxiety disorders or depression, are more commonly expressed in girls.
Understanding the differences in the expression of developmental disorders in boys and girls
Teodora Gliga, Centre for Brain and Cognitive Development, Birkbeck
The prevalence of developmental disorders such as autism or ADHD is higher in boys, while other conditions, such as anxiety disorders or depression, are more commonly expressed in girls. The factors that drive these differences, whether they are biological or environmental, are poorly understood. The TRIGGER work package 3.3.2 aims to develop a framework for investigating sex/gender differences in development in populations of infants at familial risk of autism. The participants in this study are recruited as part of BASIS (http://www.basisnetwork.org) the British Autism Study for Infant Siblings.
I am currently the network coordinator of BASIS and I oversee a variety of projects as part of these longitudinal studies. One of these projects, run in collaboration with Rachael Bedford from King’s College, London, looked at how some of the early biomarkers of autism we had previously described, relate to later autism symptoms in boys and girls. Interestingly, we found that at one year of age biomarkers were expressed similarly in boys and girls but that only in boys they predicted later symptoms.
This research was published in Molecular Autism and will be presented in May 2016, at the International Conference for Infant Studies, in New Orleans. Our follow-up work aims to understand the nature of protective factors that break the link between early biomarkers and later symptoms in girls.
Bibliography
Bedford, R., Jones, E. J., Johnson, M. H., Pickles, A., Charman, T., & Gliga, T. (2016). Sex differences in the association between infant markers and later autistic traits. Molecular Autism, 7(1), 1.
Gliga, T., Jones, E. J., Bedford, R., Charman, T., & Johnson, M. H. (2014). From early markers to neuro-developmental mechanisms of autism. Developmental Review, 34(3), 189-207.
http://www.cbcd.bbk.ac.uk/people/scientificstaff/teodora/copy_of_Gligadevreview.pdf
Awards
2016 BPS Neal O’Connor Award for research in developmental disorders
CV: here