mike91 wrote:
Has there been any scientific multi-generational autism studies i.e. grandfather - father - son, looking at the severity and functionality of each generation to see if they all share the similar level of functionality?
I understand the concept of BAP, but just wondered if one could expect an autistic son to be similar to his father or grandfather in level of abilities & IQ?
"Functioning" isn't really a meaningful term.
While I don't think there are any studies into what you specifically want to look at (after all, not many grandparents have an autism diagnosis), I strongly suspect that the answer would be "no". If I had an identical twin then there is only a 90% chance that he or she would be autistic. While this shows that autism has a strong genetic component, it's not entirely genetic and is also very unpredictable, although that could change as our knowledge improves.
Studies looking at symptom severity have found even weaker relationships. And remember that while an identical twin shares 100% of the same DNA and the same prenatal environment, a grandson inherits, on average, less than 25% of his DNA from his paternal grandfather and to my knowledge has never shared a prenatal environment (sounds flippant but might be possible in a century or so through IVF and cloning).