Epigenetics and Autism Spectrum Disorder: Is There a Correlation?

The current occurrence of ASD in the United States is about 1 in 68 children—an astonishing increase of over a factor of 100 compared to 2,000 (https://www.cdc.gov/ncbddd/autism/addm.html) (Zablotsky et al., 2015). [...]it is imperative to develop novel treatment modalities for which understanding the pathogenetic factors underlying ASD is of utmost importance. [...]epigenetic mechanisms involving DNA methylation, post-translational modifications of histone proteins, and transcriptional regulations (Figure 1) that are key to neurodevelopmental processes in-utero can possibly be affected by maternal lifestyle factors such as smoking, alcohol, obesity, and malnutrition (Barua and Junaid, 2015; Banik et al., 2017; Modabbernia et al., 2017). [...]it was concluded that changes in gene expression in autism may result from regulatory mechanisms different from gene methylation. Efforts to study genome-wide DNA methylation in relation to ASD should likely include a greater sample size and samples from same species in order to easily compare data from different studies.