Grant: Master's Award: Canada Graduate Scholarships

Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) and autism are mental illnesses that affect many people. They have both been explored by looking at the world we live in and by looking at our genes. One problem with studying ADHD and autism is that they affect everybody in different ways and with different results. Groups with ADHD tend to be very different from each other. Groups with autism also differ from each other. These differences make it hard to decide which part of our genes or parts of the world around us are important enough to study. In order to tackle this problem, scientists have begun looking at something called 'endophenotypes,' which may help us understand how the world we live in affects our bodies and vice versa. Endophenotypes can be measured using video game-like tasks. It is well known that those with different mental illnesses have many things in common, even though their problems have different names. Recently scientists have suggested that different illnesses (such as ADHD and autism) share problems in their genes. We will test the idea that these disorders also share an endophenotype. To look at this question, we will use information collected from the Province of Ontario Neurodevelopmental Disorders database on children with ADHD and autism, and examine their scores on a video game that measures what might be an endophenotype. If our ideas are correct and children with ADHD and autism do worse on these tasks, it will help us understand the genetic roots of ADHD and autism, which may in turn lead to better treatments.