Latest Research

Dig into the Casanova Lab's latest research! We'll add links to new papers and media articles as they become available.

Our new paper in the Journal of Medical Genetics reports an enrichment of Ehlers-Danlos-like features in women with the FMR1 premutation, including increased joint hypermobility and other connective tissue manifestations. These findings expand the recognized clinical phenotype associated with the FMR1 premutation and suggest that connective tissue involvement may be an important, underrecognized component of fragile X premutation-associated conditions.

Our new paper in JAMA Psychiatry dropped today. In it, we report that the rise in autism diagnosis in the last decade appears to be mainly driven by increased diagnosis in females, including adult women.

This is an exciting area of research as it shows that female diagnosis is indeed slowly catching up to what was traditionally considered a very male-skewed neurotype.

While we don't know what exactly are the factors driving these changes, one intriguing possibility is social media as a source of education amongst autistic people and their families, prompting more people to actively seek diagnosis. We hope to study this question more in future!

This work was a fantastic collaboration between Saint Louis University's Psychiatry and Neurology departments.

As a follow-up to our earlier paper in Molecular Psychiatry, in our new paper in BioEssays, we discuss both "pushing" and "pulling" factors that may be simulataneously beneficial and mildly harmful, leading to low but consistent levels of Neandertal DNA in the human genome, some of which may increase the likelihood that a person develops autism.