American journal of medical genetics. Part B, Neuropsychiatric genetics : the official publication of the International Society of Psychiatric Genetics. (8)
In the present work, we provide further evidence for the involvement of the integrin alpha-4 precursor gene (ITGA4) in the etiology of autism, by replicating previous findings of a genetic association with autism in various independent populations. The ITGA4 gene maps to the autism linkage region on 2q31-33 and is therefore a plausible positional candidate. We tested eight single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in the ITGA4 gene region for association with autism in a sample of 164 nuclear families. Evidence for association was found for the rs155100 marker (P = 0.019) and for a number of specific marker haplotypes containing this SNP (0.00053
