Professor Gillberg receives substantial ALF funding for Gothenburg Autism Project

The longitudinal collaborative Gothenburg Autism Project (GAP) is a unique study at the international forefront. It will be continued and extended in 2025-2027. It examines prevalence, pathogenesis, outcome, and intervention in autism and Early Symptomatic Syndromes Eliciting Neurodevelopmental Clinical Examinations/ESSENCE - a term launched by Professor Christopher Gillberg with a view to better capturing the reality that autism overlaps with many other problems and disorders, sharing symptoms, genes and affected neural circuitries with these.

GAP consists of many substudies and below you will find an overview:

• There is an epidemiological part including 11 different prevalence studies within and across countries testing the hypothesis that registered autism but not autism phenotype is more common than previously thought, but equally common across cultures
• There are new follow-up studies, including of epilepsy, into high adult age of population groups of autism identified 35 years ago
• A clinical part looks at early markers by studying infant siblings of children with autism, toddlers who screen positive for autism, and by following school-age children into adult age
• There is a focus on comorbidity, and on girls in all substudies
• A genetic part looks at heritability of autism and related ESSENCE in very large population twin samples, and at linkage/candidate genes in multiply and singly affected families with autism. The focus is on early neurodevelopmental genes, including neuroligins, neurexin, SHANK, and melatonin genes, which GAP was first to show (in Nature) are often mutated in autism and other ESSENCE
• A pathogenic part deals with aspects of microanatomy, neurochemistry, immunology, neurophysiology (including peripheral nervous system), radiology, motor performance, eye-tracking, and neuropsychology in representative groups with autism and controls
• A final part looks at intervention, including intensive multimodal training, a new family CBT intervention, and RCTs of new drugs for core autism symptoms.