Vanessa Hus

Publications (24) View all

• Article: Response to ritvo and ritvo letter.

  Marisela Huerta, Somer L Bishop, Amie Duncan, Vanessa Hus, Catherine Lord
  American Journal of Psychiatry 04/2013; 170(4):445-6. · 12.54 Impact Factor
• Article: Commentary: Advancing measurement of ASD severity and social competence: a reply to Constantino and Frazier ().

  Vanessa Hus, Somer Bishop, Katherine Gotham, Marisela Huerta, Catherine Lord
  Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry 03/2013; · 4.28 Impact Factor
• Article: Exploring the Relationship Between Anxiety and Insistence on Sameness in Autism Spectrum Disorders.

  Katherine Gotham, Somer L Bishop, Vanessa Hus, Marisela Huerta, Sabata Lund, Andreas Buja, Abba Krieger, Catherine Lord
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  ABSTRACT: Elevated anxiety symptoms are one of the most common forms of psychopathology to co-occur with autism spectrum disorders (ASDs). The purpose of this study was to explore the association between anxiety and ASD symptoms, particularly the degree to which the relationship is explained by insistence on sameness (IS) behaviors and/or cognitive ability. The sample included 1429 individuals aged 5:8-18:0 years who participated in the Simons Simplex Collection, a genetic consortium study of ASD. Child Behavior Checklist Anxiety Problems T-scores and Autism Diagnostic Interview-Revised "IS" item raw totals were treated as both categorical and continuous measures of anxiety and IS, respectively. Chronological age, verbal intelligence quotient (IQ), and a variety of ASD phenotype-related and other behavioral variables were assessed for potential association with anxiety and IS. Anxiety and IS continuous variables were minimally, although significantly, associated with each other and with chronological age and verbal IQ. Neither anxiety nor IS was associated with other core autism diagnostic scores. Anxiety was associated with a variety of other psychiatric and behavioral symptoms in ASD, including irritability, attention problems, and aggression, while IS was not. Anxiety and IS appear to function as distinct constructs, each with a wide range of expression in children with ASD across age and IQ levels. Thus, both variables could be of use in ASD behavioral research or in dimensional approaches to genetic exploration. Unlike IS, however, anxiety is related to non-ASD-specific behavioral symptoms. Autism Res 2012, ●●: ●●-●●. © 2012 International Society for Autism Research, Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
  Autism Research 12/2012; · 3.69 Impact Factor
• Article: Standardizing ADOS Domain Scores: Separating Severity of Social Affect and Restricted and Repetitive Behaviors.

  Vanessa Hus, Katherine Gotham, Catherine Lord
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  ABSTRACT: Standardized Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule (ADOS) scores provide a measure of autism severity that is less influenced by child characteristics than raw totals (Gotham et al. in Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 39(5), 693-705 2009). However, these scores combine symptoms from the Social Affect (SA) and Restricted and Repetitive Behaviors (RRB) domains. Separate calibrations of each domain would provide a clearer picture of ASD dimensions. The current study separately calibrated raw totals from the ADOS SA and RRB domains. Standardized domain scores were less influenced by child characteristics than raw domain totals, thereby increasing their utility as indicators of Social-Communication and Repetitive Behavior severity. Calibrated domain scores should facilitate efforts to examine trajectories of ASD symptoms and links between neurobiological and behavioral dimensions.
  Journal of Autism and Childhood Schizophrenia 11/2012; · 3.06 Impact Factor
• Article: Common genetic variants, acting additively, are a major source of risk for autism.

  Lambertus Klei, Stephan J Sanders, Michael T Murtha, Vanessa Hus, Jennifer K Lowe, A Jeremy Willsey, Daniel Moreno-De-Luca, Timothy W Yu, Eric Fombonne, Daniel Geschwind, [......], Donna M Martin, Eric M Morrow, Christopher A Walsh, Nadine M Melhem, Pauline Chaste, James S Sutcliffe, Matthew W State, Edwin H Cook, Kathryn Roeder, Bernie Devlin
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  ABSTRACT: BACKGROUND: Autism spectrum disorders (ASD) are early onset neurodevelopmental syndromes typified by impairments in reciprocal social interaction and communication, accompanied by restricted and repetitive behaviors. While rare and especially de novo genetic variation are known to affect liability, whether common genetic polymorphism plays a substantial role is an open question and the relative contribution of genes and environment is contentious. It is probable that the relative contributions of rare and common variation, as well as environment, differs between ASD families having only a single affected individual (simplex) versus multiplex families who have two or more affected individuals. METHODS: By using quantitative genetics techniques and the contrast of ASD subjects to controls, we estimate what portion of liability can be explained by additive genetic effects, known as narrow-sense heritability. We evaluate relatives of ASD subjects using the same methods to evaluate the assumptions of the additive model and partition families by simplex/multiplex status to determine how heritability changes with status. RESULTS: By analyzing common variation throughout the genome, we show that common genetic polymorphism exerts substantial additive genetic effects on ASD liability and that simplex/multiplex family status has an impact on the identified composition of that risk. As a fraction of the total variation in liability, the estimated narrow-sense heritability exceeds 60% for ASD individuals from multiplex families and is approximately 40% for simplex families. By analyzing parents, unaffected siblings and alleles not transmitted from parents to their affected children, we conclude that the data for simplex ASD families follow the expectation for additive models closely. The data from multiplex families deviate somewhat from an additive model, possibly due to parental assortative mating. CONCLUSIONS: Our results, when viewed in the context of results from genome-wide association studies, demonstrate that a myriad of common variants of very small effect impacts ASD liability.
  Molecular autism. 10/2012; 3(1):9.