Autism and relation with genetic

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn25148-girls-may-be-more-resilient-to-autismlinked-mutations.html#.Ux354Pl5NyQ

Autism is less common in girls than in boys because their brains are more "resilient" To see if the mutations affect men and women differently, Sebastien Jacqueman at the University Hospital of Lausanne in Switzerland and colleagues measured the frequency of two different kinds of mutation in 762 families that had a child with autism. This has led to the theory that females are protected to some extent biologically, although others have proposed that a social bias leads to more boys than girls being diagnosed with the likes of ASD. Jacquemont says this suggests it takes more mutations for autism to arise in girls than in boys. "Females function a lot better than males with similar mutations," he says.This suggests the female brain requires more extreme genetic alterations than the male brain to produce symptoms, they say.One possible explanation for this is that since females have two X chromosomes rather than one, one X may compensate for damage to the other,