Age of parents a factor in autism
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As detailed in a post last week, there’s no credible evidence that vaccines increase the risk for children contracting autism.What is significant, however, is the age of the parents when they conceive said child.Via the NY Times:
In a study published online on Monday in the journal Autism Research, the researchers analyzed almost five million births in California during the 1900s and 12,159 cases of autism diagnosed in those children–a sample large enough to examine how the risk of autism was affected when one parent was a specific age and the other was the same age or considerably older or younger.
What’s interesting about this study is that it shows how the relation in age between mother and father can also affect autism risk, so that men over 40 who have children with women under 30 have a 59 percent higher risk for having an autistic baby than if the man was younger.
Moreover, the UC Davis study showed that every five-year increase in a mother’s age meant a rise of 18 percent in terms of the risk of having an autistic child.
As a society, we are having children later in our years. There’s a lot to be said for that. Waiting until the folly of youth passes us by sounds sensible enough when entering into a project as serious as raising a child. On the other hand, there are risks with waiting. Downs syndrome–and now autism–are factors that are not easily ignored in the decision of when to pro-create.
Though the study did not find a matching rise in the number of women and men who had children later in their years as compared with the rise in the number of children diagnosed with autism, it may not be unreasonable to think that the difference can be made up for by the fact that older parents tend to be more engaged in every aspect of a child’s early years. In other words, the older the parent the more likely he or she will be to look for the first signs of trouble.
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David–This is an important study, as you correctly point out. Much of the coverage of this study has, however, left out the context, namely that a variety of health risks are associated with older fathers.
Autism is one, along with schizophrenia, progeria, the disorder of rapid aging; Marfan syndrome, a disorder marked by very long arms, legs, fingers and toes, as well as life-threatening heart defects, and a kind of dwarfism. More recent studies have linked fathers’ age to prostate and other cancers in their children. And in September 2008 re- searchers linked older fathers to an increased risk of bipolar disorder in their children.
The info comes from my article last year in Scientific American Mind, entitled The Father Factor. You can find it here:
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=the-father-factor
Paul,
Good stuff. Thanks for the link.