Autism spectrum disorder, ASD, can run in families, but rather than being inherited could it be down to a parent’s job and the skills they need to do their job, affecting their children?

Sounds far-fetched?

Well, I thought so till I read the research of Dr Chiara Orsini.

She works in the Department of Social Policy at the London School of Economics and is Lecturer in Economics at Sheffield University. Along with her colleagues, she has been investigating the connection between parental skills and ASD, working with statistics of children in Denmark over a 20-year time-frame.

The big question they were trying to answer is, could traits that help parents to do their particular job well, like requiring attention to detail and routine, be linked to the likelihood of their children developing ASD?

ASD which includes autism and Asperger’s syndrome, can show up as difficulties in social interactions, a preference for repetition, and a tendency toward rigid thinking and behaviour.

The data on children with ASD was mapped on to various jobs and the skills needed to do them, allowing the researchers to identify connections between the likelihood of ASD in children. The study’s findings are compelling when it comes to fathers.

Jobs such as air traffic controllers, chemical engineers, computer professionals, and medical professionals where meticulousness and structured thinking are needed correlates with a small yet statistically significant rise in ASD frequency in children. On the other hand, fathers whose occupations emphasise communications skills – such as empathy and interacting with people, like childcare workers and police officers – are less likely to have a child who is diagnosed with ASD than fathers who didn’t work in these types of fields.

This doesn’t mean a father’s job can cause ASD but it does mean help could be given early to children at increased risk of it, and their families.

A theory put forward by leading autism expert Professor Simon Baron Cohen of Cambridge University, which suggests some extreme personality traits in parents affect the incidence of ASD, backs up the findings in this study. He claimed parents who have extreme “systems and ordering skills” are 35% more likely to have children who are diagnosed with ASD than parents with a more “balanced” mix of those skills.

But the researchers also discovered that there were large positive links between ASD in children whose parents had great empathy and communication skills.