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Father’s Age Is Linked to Risk of Autism and Schizophrenia
- simonsarris 14y agoI had heard this before but only with schizophrenia which always had me a tad worried. But I never heard: > "The overall risk to a man in his 40s or older is in the range of 2 percent, at most" Which is much more comforting to know. I never heard any risk percentage from earlier articles I've read. My father was 48 when I was born.
- michaelcampbell 14y agoMine was 44 and having lost my (adopted; non-biological) mother to Alzheimers, I've seen firsthand how that goes down. Needless to say, I'm pretty freaked out about that possibility.
- lizzard 14y agoThat's about the same risk for a 43 year old woman to have a baby with Downs. So where are all the "biological clock is ticking" articles for men?
- mahyarm 14y agoBiological clock is more about absolute fertility vs. healthy fertility.
- sliverstorm 14y agoThat's certainly how I hear it, too. I've never heard a woman expressing fear that she might have waited too long, such that her child will get Downs. Rather, fear that she might have simply waited too long, and now it is too late.
- bestes 14y agoOnce you get pregnant, though, you are labeled with the condition AMA - Advanced Maternal Age. This comes with more tests and precautions.
- Uhhrrr 14y agoI'm over 40, and I certainly have! Downs can be detected in time for an abortion, but it means that you have to get pregnant all over again, and risk Downs and the various other bad mutations again, and risk miscarriage for whatever reasons all over again, etc. So for non-fundamentalist women, there is fear of having a Downs child, but it gets rolled into the package of "worried about getting to have a successful pregnancy at all".
- continuations 14y ago> So where are all the "biological clock is ticking" articles for men? A part of that is because the risk is a lot higher for women than men. http://www.notsuperhuman.com/2010/02/pregnancy-chronicles-with-older-moms-baby%E2%80%99s-autism-risk-rises/ http://www.notsuperhuman.com/2010/02/pregnancy-chronicles-wi... "University of California-Davis researchers studied close to 5 million births during the ’90s, a decade when autism spiked in the state. "A woman’s risk for having an autistic child rose 18% for every five years she aged. "40-year-old women had... a 77% greater risk (of autistic child) than women who gave birth before 25." Being a new mom at 40 increases autism risk by 77%, vs. the 2% increase in autism risk from being a new dad at 40 or older.
- roguecoder 14y agoYour numbers are bad. I am guessing, since the article you link doesn't actually link to the scientific study, that it is referring to: http://pediatricbioscience.com/publications/pdf/Pub16.pdf http://pediatricbioscience.com/publications/pdf/Pub16.pdf This did not examine any form of causality, as the currently-linked study did, nor did it evaluate the children themselves. By not controlling for evaluation mechanisms, the study you link only addresses patterns of early diagnosis and treatment. While it is interesting, the researchers themselves say that the data is hardly conclusive. The current study, on the other hand, explores not just correlation but causation, and thus is far more persuasive. Second, you are comparing increase in risk to total overall risk. The percentage increase for men going from age 25 to 40 is 110%, not 2%. The study you link found a comparable number for women over age 40 of 0.4%.
- arscan 14y agoThe article doesn't directly mention the risk to a man in his 20's or 30's... just that up to 30% of the cases of autism has to do with the mutations associated with "older" sperm. Obviously there is a lot more work that needs to be done to understand this, but it would be nice if they presented this information in a more actionable form.
- Alex3917 14y agoIn other words, these results are statistically significant, but not clinically significant. There are entire industries that depend on you not knowing the difference between these two concepts, which makes it all the more important that you actually learn it.
- evidenceofllama 14y agoDo you mean that 2% is not a clinically significant figure? Could you explain why? (I'm not familiar with clinical significance)
- Alex3917 14y agoYes. For something to be statistically significant means there is some difference between the two groups that is most likely not attributable to random chance. For something to be clinically significant means the difference between the two groups is large enough to have noticeable health effects or impact one's decision-making about medical issues. In the book The Emperor's New Drugs, about the efficacy of anti-depressants (or lack thereof), Kirsch gives the example that if you had a group of 500,000 people and found that smiling frequently increases life expectancy by 10 seconds on average, this may well be statistically significant because the study population is so large. However, it's not clinically significant because no one really cares if they live an extra 10 seconds, certainly not enough to change some major aspect of their behavior at least. In this case, if the chances of having kids with autism or schizophrenia increase by/to? at most 2%, as the article states, then in practice this shouldn't really deter anyone from having kids. Thus, while the findings are statistically significant, they are not clinically significant.
- evidenceofllama 14y agoSo is clinical significance determined in part by perceived significance? I feel that a potential 2% risk of conditions as serious as those mentioned in the article could easily influence some people towards choosing to have kids at a younger age.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- icegreentea 14y agoWhat? It seems that there is a mechanism proposed, that is increased mutations in older men. Secondly, I think it's hardly useful to state that discoveries without mechanisms are useless. Certainly, having the mechanism is more useful, but having the correlation itself is valuable data. Or else the "law of gravity" would have been useless for a couple centuries.
- rprospero 14y agoI believe that the complaint is that the mechanism is something of a dodge. To put it differently, the Barry Allen can run faster than the speed of light. If you asked my why he can violate special relativity, I'd tell you that he was in a lab accident. That's the mechanism by which he went into a state where he was able to travel at superluminal velocity. However, that explains absolutely nothing about why he's violating special relativity. In the same way, increased mutations in the paternal DNA does explain why something weird would happen with the offspring. However, it does nothing to explain why that something weird manifests itself as autism.
- slurgfest 14y agoI'm afraid you are attacking straw men. This specific case, this specific correlation, is not really ready to go into the popular press as headlines for the general public to take home. It is easy to do controlled experiments regarding gravity which are not completely loused up with confounds. Nobody needed to go data-fishing in order to find gravity - it's a very clear and strong phenomenon. Are you sure that there are no possibly relevant systematic differences OTHER than age, between men who have children early and ones who have children late? A 'proposed' mechanism cannot substitute for understanding of what is actually happening, in the context of popular publication of data suggesting that autism is caused by having babies too late... this is a month away from the women's magazines and two months from parents being blamed for their children's autism. It would be more responsible to actually demonstrate a causal link before running to the presses.
- JPKab 14y agoThis has been "known" for years with autism, based on observational data. Normally, I don't put much into observational data, since it can be so wrong, but in the autism/paternal age case, you have a HUGE, HUGE leap in likelihood of autism based on father's age. A man in his 40's is thousands of times more likely to have an autistic child than a man in his 20's, as a I recall from previous observational data.
- arscan 14y agoA thousand times? This article says 2 - 3 times: http://www.technologyreview.com/news/428914/the-link-between-a-fathers-age-and-autism/ http://www.technologyreview.com/news/428914/the-link-between... Just curious because to me that's the most important piece of data.
- brockf 14y agoI think you may be thinking of the relationship between down syndrome and maternal age, which I have heard estimated at "thousands of times more likely". However, perhaps this is a slight exaggeration as well: http://pregnancy.about.com/cs/downsyndrome/l/bldownssyn.htm http://pregnancy.about.com/cs/downsyndrome/l/bldownssyn.htm
- anigbrowl 14y agothousands of times more likely This is the sort of thing you should check before you post. It only took a minute to find a well-sourced overview of the clinical literature on wikipedia, with results clustering around a 40% increased risk of autism for the offspring of men in their forties (vs men in their twenties), though one study from Israel found the the risk to be almost 6 times higher. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paternal_age_effect#Autism_spectrum_disorder http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paternal_age_effect#Autism_spec... To blithely suggest that the probability is 'thousands of times' higher is misleading to the point of irresponsibility. Think of the confusion and anxiety such misinformation can create in the mind of an uninformed reader.
- tobias3 14y agoDoes anyone have tipps about where to perma-freeze sperm? Seriously, shouldn't be too of a problem?
- dhughes 14y agoToo late for me at 43 but it was the first thing I thought about too. But I wonder can freezing sperm long-term cause degradation just as bad as it is for a man over 40 years-old?
- mengine 14y agoGreat idea until the study on frozen sperm comes out.
- gwern 14y agoWe know that whatever damage is caused, it can't be too bad because children born using sperm donors - which can be frozen for storage - don't have increased defect rates, but have decreased defect rates, something like 1/5 /checks http://www.gwern.net/Ethical%20sperm%20donation http://www.gwern.net/Ethical%20sperm%20donation for his old citation Yes, 1/5 according to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sperm%20donation%23Sperm_donation%20and%20reduced%20birth%20defects http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sperm%20donation%23Sperm_donati...
- specialist 14y agoThe donation process sucks too.
- cjensen 14y agoCorrect me if I'm wrong... but this is just a study which finds a correlation. While the article hints at causation, does the study actually find that?
- streptomycin 14y agoWhat would "actually find that" mean to you in this context? Science is not as clean and perfect as many would like to imagine. A strong correlation and a plausible biological mechanism combined are about as strong evidence as is possible.
- cjensen 14y agoPeople who have children later in life are going to have a number of significant demographic difference from those who have children earlier. Here's how you rule out each possibility: for each one, you pair up people in the "earlier" and "later" groups who have identical demographics. If the subgroups have identical outcomes, you have found the cause. If not, you have eliminated a cause.
- streptomycin 14y agoThat still doesn't "prove" causation, as there are innumerable demographics that are either impossible to match or nobody thinks to match. And FWIW, the paper does say that "factors other than father’s age do not seem to contribute substantially to the mutation rate diversity in our data".
- learc83 14y ago> "factors other than father’s age do not seem to contribute substantially to the mutation rate diversity in our data". But as another poster already pointed out, age could be hiding other factors. Exposure to environmental factors that could cause mutations change with time, e.g, older fathers would have been exposed to pesticides that were banned before younger fathers were born, nutritional changes, etc...
- JamisonM 14y agoI wonder how much of the mutations in genetic material relate to simply aging and how much of it might be a reflection of environmental exposures based on when the father was born? Substances like mercury or lead spring to mind as things that someone just 10 years older than myself would have likely had much more exposure to despite living in the same place and having the same socioeconomic status. The fact that the female-contributed genetic material error rates are static might speak to this effect to some degree. I wonder if they are studying autism diagnosis going back in time or if all the autistic children were around the same age.
- learc83 14y agoVery good point. Does lead cause any chromosome mutations? Because if it does the phase out of leaded gasoline alone could have a huge impact.
- specialist 14y agoSubstances like mercury or lead spring to mind... Ditto chemo, steroids, smoking, alcohol, marijuana, human growth factor... Professional baseball fathers seem to have quite a few kids with physical troubles. I've always wondered if it's job related.
- rosser 14y agoBiologically, this makes sense. A woman is born with all her eggs already in her ovaries, while men manufacture sperm on demand. Obviously, the consequences of accumulated genetic damage can only manifest in the latter case.
- maxerickson 14y agoThere are people actively investigating the origin of eggs; they aren't sure the long held view is correct. For instance: http://www.plosgenetics.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pgen.1002848 http://www.plosgenetics.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fj...
- jh73 14y agoThis is the third such study published within this year. The difference being that this study did full genome sequencing rather than exome (regions coding for proteins) sequencing. The other papers: O'Roak BJ, et al. Sporadic autism exomes reveal a highly interconnected protein network of de novo mutations. Nature. 2012 Sanders JS, et al. De novo mutations revealed by whole-exome sequencing are strongly associated with autism. Nature. 2012
- ianb 14y agoThese are disorders that effect a person's personality, which could mean all sorts of new variables to control for. A man who has mild symptoms of autism or schizophrenia may well take longer to establish himself in his life and have children.
- zmmmmm 14y agoPerhaps thats why they were ... "focusing on families in which parents with no signs of a mental disorder gave birth to a child who developed autism or schizophrenia"
- denysonique 14y agoI think that the father's age might be also linked to the intelligence of his child. Schizophrenic people often have a high intelligence quotient. A link between autism and intelligence is also probable.
- PaulHoule 14y agothe decision of people to have children late is harmful to society in a number of ways. i know an "irresponsible" woman who had a child when she was a teenager. she was 40 when her child was in college and ready to move on in her life. if she lives until 80, she'll share 60 years of experiences with her child on average. if some professor decides to wait until they have tenure (say 40) before they have kids, they're likely to have 40 years of overlap. they'll be dealing with an unruly adolescent when they are 55. if you have a kid at 50 (some people do!) then you have 30 years of overlap and you're dealing with an unruly teenager at 65! (Oddly, have kids at 30, like I did and my dad did, and you're in your 40s when your kids are in their teens. The 40s seem to be a time that parallels adolesence and a number of ways... Stan Lee and Mike Ditko were in their 40's when they were imagining the adventures of teen Peter Parker...) so having kids late in life means that parents have less experience with their children and children get less out of their parents. (note that smaller nuclear families have an almost genocidal effect on extended families... if you have N siblings on average, you have N^2 cousins!) for years i've believed that late childbearing has an effect similar to an increase in background radiation, this study confirms that and just adds to the case
- CamperBob2 14y agoIf your primary purpose as a human being is to reproduce, then yes, your arguments have merit. Otherwise, you are projecting your own values and desires on a lot of people who potentially don't share them.
- PaulHoule 14y agoIt's not just your own values, it's the effect that your values have on civilization as a whole. I see civilization as a race between our ability to create problems and our ability to solve problems. You can make a case that a high reproductive rate is a social danger because it causes resource depletion and overall causes us to develop problems faster just because more people make more problems. On the other hand, a low reproductive rate makes problems too. It's much easier to fund the kind of welfare state that the left wants when we have a high reproductive rate. The dreams of the right, in which many of us can save money in individual accounts and enjoy an easy retirement, are also dashed by a low reproductive rate. Honestly I don't know what the optimal reproductive rate is. But I think there is something more to life than the quality and quantity of your orgasms, what pleasure you get, and the self-aggrandizement you experience making other people rich and famous. Quite a few people have worked hard to create the civilization we have, and in particular, two parents invested a lot to raise me. I think it's fair to "pass this forward" and expect that we all produce (on average) a child each and that that's just a part of the mission we have on planet Earth.
- FrojoS 14y agoSimilar research results for bipolar: Bipolar Disorder Tied to Age of Fathers By NICHOLAS BAKALAR NY Times, September 8, 2008 http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/09/health/09bipo.html http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/09/health/09bipo.html
- xiaoma 14y agoOn one hand older fathers tend to pass on longer telemeres and likely longer lifespans, on the other there are likely these risks. I guess you can't have it all.
- 6ren 14y agoMutations can also be beneficial. I wonder if other traits, such as intelligence variability, are also related to father age? There's even a nice evolutionary coincidence: if you wanted to play with genes to make something, it's a good idea to start with the genes of older fathers, because they've shown they can survive longer.