
Father’s Age Is Linked to Risk of Autism and Schizophrenia - evidenceofllama
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/23/health/fathers-age-is-linked-to-risk-of-autism-and-schizophrenia.html?_r=1&hp
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JamisonM
I 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.

~~~
specialist
_Substances 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.

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simonsarris
I 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.

~~~
lizzard
That'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
Biological clock is more about absolute fertility vs. healthy fertility.

~~~
sliverstorm
That'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_.

~~~
Uhhrrr
I'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".

~~~
nsxwolf
So, any woman who wouldn't abort a Downs baby is a fundamentalist now?

~~~
Uhhrrr
Fair enough - they might have other reasons.

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jh73
This 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

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ianb
These 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
Perhaps 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"

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PaulHoule
the 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
If 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.

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PaulHoule
It'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.

~~~
Roybatty
That's just your opinion that having children when older is harmful to
society. But what I consider more harmful to society is this thinking that
every single individual action has to be weighed against the "benefits of
society". This thinking seems to be more and more prevalent and is dangerous
for freedom.

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tobias3
Does anyone have tipps about where to perma-freeze sperm? Seriously, shouldn't
be too of a problem?

~~~
mengine
Great idea until the study on frozen sperm comes out.

~~~
gwern
We 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> for his old citation

Yes, 1/5 according to
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sperm%20donation%23Sperm_donati...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sperm%20donation%23Sperm_donation%20and%20reduced%20birth%20defects)

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cjensen
Correct 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
What 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
People 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
That 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
> "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...

~~~
streptomycin
I know, that's the point I was replying to in my previous post..

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6ren
Mutations 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.

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xiaoma
On 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.

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FrojoS
Similar 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>

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rosser
Biologically, 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
There 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%2Fj...](http://www.plosgenetics.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pgen.1002848)

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denysonique
I 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.

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JPKab
This 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.

~~~
anigbrowl
_thousands 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_spec...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paternal_age_effect#Autism_spectrum_disorder)

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.

