Data from the Baby Siblings Research Consortium confirm and specify the nature of the female protective effect in autism: A commentary on Messinger et al

Abstract

Sibling recurrence data from the Baby Siblings Research Consortium (BSRC) recapitulate results from very large clinical family studies that demonstrate the absence of the Carter effect and provide clarification of the nature of the female protective effect in ASD. This legacy prospective data collection confirmed marked differences in the proportions of males versus females who lie along deviant trajectories of social development in the setting of inherited liability to autism--a phenomenon which defines the female protective effect--and demonstrate that among affected children, sex differences are modest and homologous to those observed among non-ASD children.

Keywords: Autism spectrum disorder; Compensatory; Female protective effect; Resilience; Sex.

Fig. 1

Schematic reconstruction of Figure 3 (panel A) of the original manuscript (Messinger et al. 2015). ADOS social affect scores of high-risk infant siblings (n = 1241, 58 % male), males in black, females in red; for children deemed “non-ASD”, dashed lines; children deemed “ASD”, solid lines. The panel is schematically redrawn to scale, with line widths depicting respective sample proportions. Whereas 193 males deviated enough from normality (black arrow) to contribute to the categorically diagnosed group, only 59 females deviated enough from normality (red arrow) to contribute to the categorically diagnosed group. The female protective effect is best represented by this proportional contrast (represented by the relative width of the arrows depicting the proportion for each sex who crossed over from typicality to abnormality) rather than by sex differences within each group