A new study has led researchers with the National Institutes of Health to discover three genes that might end up predisposing people to stuttering, a condition which currently affects an estimated 3 million Americans, out of which 5% are young children.
As the condition which affects speech tends to run in the family, it has been suspected for very long that genes have a role to play in it.
In a unique and fresh genetic study, which included families with clusters of persistent stutterers, researchers working with NIH's National Institute of Deafness and Other Communication Disorders managed to find a possible location of gene variants with could be associated with the speech disorder.
In the latest study, researchers found some very specific mutations of genes that seem to lead to stuttering.
Details of the study have been published in the New England Journal of Medicine.