Cognitive deficits in parents from multiple-incidence autism families.

This study compares parents of two autistic children with parents of a Down syndrome (DS) proband, on tests of intelligence, reading and spelling, and executive function. Autism parents performed significantly worse than DS parents on performance IQ, a test of executive function, and some reading measures (e.g. passage comprehension and rapid automatized naming). These results suggest that cognitive deficits may be an expression of the underlying genetic liability for autism and that these characteristics may contribute to a more broadly defined autism phenotype.