"INCREASED RISK OF SCHIZOPHRENIA WAS ASSOCIATED WITH ADVANCED PATERNAL AGE, PARTICULARY IN FEMALES......."

Are there more females with paternal age derived autism/early childhood schizophrenia than boys? Lisa Croen of Kaiser found more girls. Is that also reflected in the Reichenberg study where the ratio of boys to girls with autism was nearly 1:1?
Do the possibly de novo X-linked mutations in some women cause the some sons of these women to be on autistic spectrum? What happened to the ASD-CARC OLDER DADS AND AUTISM SURVEY data? It had a fabulous response from families. I bet Autism Speaks knows what happened to the data and why it was never published.

Older Dads and Autism Survey
Update: Sept 13 2006
The research study by Reichenberg et al (2006) attracted a lot of attention from both the scientific community and the autism community, with many comments supporting and others criticising the results. Such a reaction is important because it helps us to explore new areas of research and to design better studies.
Our Older Dads and Autism Survey is not a rigorous scientific study. BUT we are trying to see whether there is merit in conducting a more in-depth study. This survey taught us many things - the most important of which is that so many families want to participate in research to find answers. Within one hour and 20 minutes of posting, we had 100 responses! By the end of the first day (only 7 hours), we had 300! The word has spread and you helped make that happen - Thank you. We had more than 1000 responses in only 5 days! We are sharing some of those findings with you now, and the analysis of our results will be posted early next week. Please continue to invite others to participate and we hope that you will come back to participate in other surveys.

If you have not already completed this survey, click here.











July 7, 2003

Parental Age and Risk of Schizophrenia

A Case-control Study

Majella Byrne, MSc, PhD; Esben Agerbo, MSc; Henrik Ewald, MD, DMSc; William W. Eaton, PhD; Preben Bo Mortensen, MD, DMSc

Arch Gen Psychiatry. 2003;60:673-678.

Conclusion Increased risk of schizophrenia was associated with advanced paternal age, particularly in females, lending support to the theory that de novo mutations, possibly X-linked, associated with increased parental age might be responsible for some cases of schizophrenia.



Methods We performed a national population, nested, case-control study based on Danish longitudinal register data. The sample included 7704 patients with an ICD-8 or ICD-10 diagnosis of schizophrenia admitted to a psychiatric facility between 1981 and 1998 in Denmark, and 192 590 individually time-, age-, and sex-matched population controls, their parents, and siblings. The risk of schizophrenia associated with increasing parental age was investigated using conditional logistic regression and controlling for family socioeconomic and demographic factors and family psychiatric history.


Results Advanced paternal and maternal age was associated with increased risk of schizophrenia in univariate analyses. Controlling for socioeconomic factors and family psychiatric history, increased risk of schizophrenia was identified in those with a paternal age of 50 years or older. Sex-specific analyses revealed that the risk of schizophrenia was increased for males with fathers 55 years or older (incidence rate ratio [IRR], 2.10; 95% confidence interval [CI], 1.35-3.28); for females, the risk associated with paternal age was substantial for fathers aged 50 to 54 years (IRR, 2.22; 95% CI, 1.44-3.44) and 55 years or older (IRR, 3.53; 95% CI, 1.82-6.83).