Aims:
Obesity is a significant problem for patients taking atypical
antipsychotics. There were two aims of our study. The first aim was to compare the prevalence of
overweight and
obesity between children and adolescents with
autism spectrum disorder (ASD) treated with
risperidone with the general pediatric population. The second aim was to investigate the association of the HTR2C -759C>T, ABCB1 1236C>T, ABCB1 2677G>T/A, and ABCB1 3435C>T polymorphisms with
risperidone-induced
overweight and
obesity in children and adolescents with ASD. Methods:
Body weight and height were measured in 134 subjects.
Overweight and
obesity in children and adolescents were classified using the International
Obesity Task Force (IOTF) criteria. Genotyping was performed by TaqMan real-time polymerase chain reaction (PCR). Results: Our study found that the prevalence of
overweight and
obesity was significantly higher in children and adolescents with ASD treated with
risperidone compared with healthy individuals (p = 0.01 and p = 0.002). The genetic polymorphisms of HTR2C -759C>T, ABCB1 1236C>T, ABCB1 2677G>T/A, and ABCB1 3435C>T were not associated with
overweight/
obesity in children and adolescents with ASD treated with
risperidone after adjustment for multiple comparisons by the method of Bonferroni. Additionally, haplotype analysis revealed that there was no significant association between ABCB1 3435T-2677T/A-1236T haplotype and
overweight/
obesity. In multivariate logistic regression, after adjustment by the Bonferroni correction, there was only the duration of
risperidone treatment that was significantly associated with
overweight/
obesity in children and adolescents with ASD. Conclusions: The findings suggest that children and adolescents with ASD treated with
risperidone are at a higher risk of
obesity, especially patients with extended treatment with
risperidone. For the pharmacogenetic factors, -759C>T polymorphism of HTR2C gene and 1236C>T, 2677G>T/A, and 3435C>T polymorphisms of ABCB1 gene were not likely to be associated with the susceptibility to
overweight/
obesity in children and adolescents treated with
risperidone. Due to the small sample size, further studies with a larger independent group are needed to confirm these findings.