Western Michigan University ScholarWorks at WMU Master's Theses Graduate College 4-1976 The Prevalence of 47, XYY Males among Collegiate Basketball Players Joy Ann Price Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.wmich.edu/masters_theses Part of the Genetics and Genomics Commons Recommended Citation Price, Joy Ann, "The Prevalence of 47, XYY Males among Collegiate Basketball Players" (1976). Master's Theses. 2377. https://scholarworks.wmich.edu/masters_theses/2377 This Masters Thesis-Open Access is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate College at ScholarWorks at WMU. It has been accepted for inclusion in Master's Theses by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks at WMU. For more information, please contact [email protected]. THE PREVALENCE OF 47,XYY MALES AMONG COLLEGIATE BASKETBALL PLAYERS by Joy Ann Price A Project Report Submitted to the Faculty of The Graduate College in partial fulfillment of the Specialist in Arts Degree Western Michigan University Kalamazoo, Michigan A p ri1 1976 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS My appreciation and gratitude go to the members of my committee, Dr. Walter E. Johnson, Dr. Paul E. Holkeboer and Dr. Mary M. Rigney. My thanks go to them as veil as Dr. Rodney Cyrus of the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh and Dr. W.J. Perreault of Lawrence University, whose advic encouragement and constructive criticism were most h e lp f u l. Finally, I would like to make a special note of gratitude to my husband, James H. Price, for his patience during the many ups and downs of this research. Joy Ann Price i i Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. 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Silver prints of "photographs" may be ordered at additional charge by writing the Order Department, giving the catalog number, title, author and specific pages you wish reproduced. 5. PLEASE NOTE: Some pages may have indistinct print. Filmed as received. Xerox University Microfilms 300 North Zeeb Road Ann Arbor, Michigan 48106 MASTERS THESIS M-8451 PRICE, Joy Ann THE PREVALENCE OF 47,XYY MALES AMONG COLLEGIATE BASKETBALL PLAYERS. Western Michigan U niversity, Sp.A., 1976 Genetics Xerox University Microfilms,Ann Arbor, Michigan 48106 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. TABLE OF CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGE I INTRODUCTION ......................................................................... 1 First Phase ................................................................... 2 Second. P h a s e ................................................................... 3 Surveys of Mental—Penal Institutions . 3 Surveys Outside of Mental-Penal S e t t i n g s ................................................................... 10 Third P hase ................................................................... 14 Fourth Phase ................................................................... 17 Aetiology, Familial and Ethnic Considerations ......................................................... 18 ♦ The Purpose of the Re se a rc h ............................... 20 II RESEARCH D E S IG N ............................................................... 21 III RESULTS .................................................................................... 26 IV DISCUSSION............................................................................... 30 i i i Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. CHAPTER I • Introduction In 1968 Court Brown^ categorized the acquisition of knowledge concerning the 47,XYY male into three major phases. The first phase came about through the accidental liscovery of XYY males undergoing treatment for various 2 physical abnormalities. Jacobs ushered in the second phase of research on the XYY after she surveyed maximum security prisoners at a State mental hospital in Scotland and found seven of the 197 examined had an XYY constitu­ tion. She described the men as being tall, below average intelligence, and aggressive. Following her discovery intense efforts were made to locate subpopulations of XYY males, particularly in criminal settings. The third phase was to determine the true incidence of the 47,XYY anomaly in the newborn population. This was aided in 1971 by the discovery of the fluorescent characteristic of the long arms of the Y chromosome. This enabled large-scale surveys of male populations to detect multiple Y anomalies similar to those already being done to identify multiple X chromo­ somes. A fourth phase of research into the XYY anomaly 3 was labeled by Borgaonkar in 1974. This phase includes double-bline comparisons of XYY newborns and carefully matched controls, identified at birth and subsequently 1 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 2 studied at various stages of development, in order to note any differences in XYY males compared with XY controls. First Phase In 1961 the first individual reported with a 47,XYY 4 karyotype was described by Sandberg and Koepf as both phenotypically normal and fertile. The man had been married twice and had normal children by both marriages. The man had been karyotyped because he had a child with Down's syndrome. Cases of XYY karyotypes among phenotypic females have 1 3 5 been reported in the literature. ’ ’ In most instances i t has been shown th a t the in d iv id u a l was a mosaic (45X/47,XYY) and that the 45X line of cells dominated. In the first extensive review of the XYY karyotype written by Court Brown^ in 1968, there is a list of 25 of the original articles published on individuals found to possess an XYY constitution. The most common reason for the individuals being studied was for undescended testes and hypogonadism. At that time, Court Brown speculated there might be some association between impaired testicular development and the XYY constitution, as well as a possible link with bone disorders. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 3 Second Phase Surveys of Mental-Penal Institutions Although the 47,XYY anomaly was reported as early as 1961 it didn't receive significant attention until 1965 when Jacobs reported identifying 3.5 percent XYY males in a survey of a mental-penal hospital in Scotland. She described the XYY patients as tall (mean height of XYY men was 71.3 inches as compared to 67.2 inches for XY controls), below-average intellectually and aggressive. She also examined 266 newborn male babies and 209 randomly selected adult males and found no XYYs. She concluded that a man more than 72 inches tall and in a maximum security prison had approximately a 50 percent chance of being XYY. Her findings ushered in a variety of surveys of special facilities, many of which found high frequencies of XYY men (Table I ). Welch et_ aj. in 1967 reported a comparable survey done on a prison population in the United States. Only one XYY individual was found in a population screened for height and mental defectiveness and failed to show a strong association between the XYY constitution and either mental retardation or aggressiveness. One factor in his study which might have contributed to its failure was the fact that most of the cases studied were blacks (21 of 35). 7 8 Later studies ’ show a racial differential in the Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. Table I Surveys of Mental-Penal Institutions Author(s) and year Location Selection Criteria Number Number 47,XYY Examined Jacobs e_t al. , 1965 Scotland None 197 7 Welch e_t aJL. , 1967 Maryland 74