RORA and autism: The significance of these findings is the likelihood that any mechanism that contributes to reduced RORA expression, including elevated levels of male hormones[12] and epigenetic modifications that may be the result of as yet unknown environmental factors[11], may lead to increased risk for autism based on the aberrant transcription of downstream targets of RORA, which we show are significantly enriched for autism candidate genes based on hypergeometric distribution analyses of our dataset in comparison with established databases of autism genes.