Association of Single Nucleotide Polymorphism in Chromosome 11 with Autism Spectrum Disorder

Several genetic loci in chromosomes 11 and 15 have recently been associated with non-syndromic autism spectrum disorder (ASD) in populations from North America and Europe. The aim of the present study was to investigate whether such an association exists in a Latvian population. Ninety-five patients with ASD in the age range 3–20 years (mean age 8 years, SD 3.18) participated in the study. The control group consisted of 161 healthy, non-related individuals without ASD randomly selected from the Latvian Genome Database. Four single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) — rs11212733, SNP rs1394119, rs2421826, rs1454985 — were genotyped by the TaqMan method. Allele frequency differences between ASD patients and control subjects were compared for each SNP using a standard chi-square test with Bonferroni correction. The level of statistical significance was set at 0.05 for nominal association. Only the genetic marker rs11212733, localised on the long arm of chromosome 11 in locus 22.3, was found to be strongly associated with the ASD patient group (χ² 6.982, P_adjusted 0.033, odds ratio 1.625). Our data demonstrating a significant relationship between the SNP rs11212733 and the development of ASD in a Latvian population suggest that it is not a population-specific relationship. Thus, future studies focusing on the DDX10 gene and related genetic loci are needed.