A letter in this month's Nature Molecular Psychiatry revealed a recent study of dogs that have led to the isolation of a gene that may be related to autism and OCD-like behaviors.
Researchers studied a group of dogs who exhibited repetitive behaviors, such as manic tail-chasing and continuously sucking on blankets. A region of chromosome #7 seemed to be responsible for their condition. However, Dr. Michael Slifer, an assistant professor of human genetics and genomics at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine and one of the study's authors, cautions the public against taking the findings too literally. "It's certainly true we have basically the same gene in us, so it's an intriguing lead, but there's a lot more work that has to be done to see if this particular finding is relevant to human health and obsessive compulsive disorder [OCD]," he said.
You can read the report in Business Week's Health Day article.
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