CHAMPAIGN, Ill. -- Genetics appears to be a principal factor in the development and persistence of stuttering, say researchers at the University of Illinois and the University of Chicago.
The likelihood a child will begin to stutter and the likelihood of continuing depend a lot on the family tree and the child's gender, the researchers report in an article in this month's issue of the Journal of Speech and Hearing Research.
After surveying the extended families of 66 children who stuttered, then analyzing the findings against models of how genetically based traits are passed on, the researchers concluded "there is something genetic underlying the transmission of stuttering in general, and that most people who stutter have that factor," said Nicoline Ambrose, a research associate with the Stuttering Research Project at the U. of I. and the lead author of the article. They further concluded that "people who persist in stuttering have additional genetic factors that are prompting them to persist," Ambrose said, "and those factors are much more common in males than females." About 2.5 million Americans stutter.
Their models suggest that susceptibility to stuttering results from the large influence of one gene, combined with the smaller effect from a small group of other genes, Ambrose said. "It's not saying there is a single stuttering gene," Ambrose noted, "but there is a gene that has a big effect on the transmission of susceptibility to stuttering." The next phase of their research, supported by the National Institutes of Health, will involve DNA testing that they hope will lead to identifying that gene, she said.
Co-authors of the article are Nancy Cox, a geneticist at the U. of C.
School of Medicine, and Ehud Yairi, a U. of I. professor of speech and hearing
science and principal investigator for the decade-long Stuttering Research
Project. Supported by NIH grants since 1989, the project is one of the few
long-term studies of children
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Contact: Craig Chamberlain, News Editor
cdchambe@uiuc.edu
217-333-2894
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
3-Jun-1997