Jennifer Gallucci had been afraid to find out, but last month, she finally got her answer: Her 2-year-old son, Jude, does not show any signs of autism.
It was a small but important victory.
Mrs. Gallucci and her husband, Bruno, who live in the tiny community of Burgettstown in Washington County, already have two sons with different forms of autism, as well as an older son with an ADHD diagnosis.
The examination showed that Jude has a speech delay but otherwise is “neurologically typical,” Mrs. Gallucci said. The psychologist “said he didn’t see anything indicating autism, and I said, ‘I like that. Let’s go home.’ “
Her son Joe, 10, has moderate autism, and only began to speak in full sentences this year. Her next youngest, 8-year-old John, has Asperger’s syndrome, a higher-functioning form of autism, and also has some problems with aggression.
Because of that history, it made sense for the Galluccis to enroll Jude at the University of Pittsburgh’s Infant Communication Lab, which is part of a national network of centers studying children who have an older sibling with autism.
In 2011, the Pitt center and several others published a study that showed that nearly 20 percent of those younger children ended up with autism themselves — far higher than the estimated 1.1 percent rate in the general population.
The study suggests that autism has a strong inherited component, but it doesn’t rule out the possibility that some families might have experienced a common environmental exposure.
As with Jill Escher in California (see related story), Mrs. Gallucci’s mother took fertility drugs when she was pregnant with Jennifer. But whether that has anything to do with her children’s autism, or whether her grandfathers being coal miners might explain it, she doesn’t know.
“Now all of a sudden autism is snowballing, and what is it?” asked Mr. Gallucci, a plumber who is currently a stay-at-home dad. “Is it toxicity in everything nowadays? Is it vaccinations? Is it food, water? There are so many different variables it’s mind-boggling.”
Even if the driving force for the Gallucci family’s autism is genetic, scientists do not yet have the ability to pinpoint a specific set of genes that are at fault in most cases of the disorder. Scott Selleck, a geneticist at Penn State University, said there are many different forms of autism, and hundreds of genes have been implicated.
