Yet one more reason to cradle rob (speaking as a female here people)

You know the age-old "wisdom" of evolutionary psychology that men pick women for their, um, fertility and women pick men for their, um, assets? Well DUDE, the tables are seriously turning. Because not only do old (which in some "mathematical models of human mating" means rich) men produce deformed sperm, they are also more likely to have autistic children. Oh yes. No longer do I worry about the freshness of my eggs, it's time to cast a gaze towards the southernly regions of  men.

In a cohort of more than 100,000 kids born in Israel, a team from the Mount Sinai Medical School and the Institute of Psychiatry in London found that 40 to 50 year old dads are 5.75 times more likely to have autistic kids compared to 15 to 29 year old kids. Now I was kind of skeptical, so I looked up the journal abstract (me wanna see statistics, pretty numbers), and yah! it's right there. As dads got older their risk increased, but for moms, the autism risk stayed the same. The relative risks for developing any other problems for children of 15 year old dads was not, however, addressed.

Does this explain the controversial, possibly non-existent, theoretically explosive BOOM in autistic kids? All those grandpa dads? (And who out there has some good stats over the changes in the average age of dads over the past few decades?) Who knows. There's still the environmental questions (toxins, mercury, those crazy contrails), basic genetics, uterine environment and blah blah we will NOT be raising the MMR connection again. But this is an interesting piece of the puzzle. My own personal feeling (other than the freshness gloat above) is that until I understand exactly what the underlying mechanism is - this supports a genetic theory, wherein the genes here are just damaged by age - I will not be pressuring my boyfriend into early fatherhood. Just yet. Some precisely applied sunscreen, however...

Comments

[Jonathan]

An interesting article! One piece of information not mentioned however is the probability of fathering an autistic child to start with. I mean the risk is 6x greater than what original incidence of autism? I only ask because my dad was 42 when I was born, and I'm a hypochondriac...

[Anna]

Sorry. I really should have included that..but before I do, let me make an exclaimer. Diagnosing autism is not an exact science and there is still a debate on why we are seeing more cases...Are parents (especially older and better educated ones?) just more likely to look for symptoms? Or is there really an epidemic?

So :
Fathers 15-29: 6 per 10,000
Fathers 30-40: 9 per 10,000
Fathers 40-50: 32 per 10,000

[Jonathan]

Ta ever so for the stats!

[lena]

For many, many years epidemiologists and population geneticists etc. have been publishing statistics about schizophrenia being due to increased paternal age, childhood cancers, leukemias, progeria, mafans disease, premenopausal breast cancer, in some studies. The sperm accumulate mutations with their many divisions and then as men age they loose the mechanism to rid themselves of defective sperm. The older a man the worse condition his sperm is. Read Finn Rasmussen's paper about how many more schizophrenic people will be born in the UK due to the increase of paternal age. Maybe freezing semen in ones 20s or 30s should be advocated. James L. Crow Ph.d said, the greatest present mutational hazard is fertile old men. The link between the epidemic of autism and older fatherhood should be studied by the CDC. It is not on the list of subjects to be studied in their grants on autism research. The advanced paternal age effect is worse in females at an earlier paternal age.