Autism and Paternal Age

Paul Law, Jonathan Sebat, Michael Wigler, Clara Lajonchere, etc. know it is the older father that transmits the muated genes for autism. They will never tell the public the connection.


The full citation of the paper published in the July 31, 2007 print edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences is: "A unified theory for sporadic and inherited autism," by Xiaoyue Zhao, Anthony Leotta, Vlad Kustanovich, Clara Lajonchere, Daniel H. Geschwind, Kiely Law, Paul Law, Shanping Qiu, Catherine Lord, Jonathan Sebat, Kenny Ye and Michael Wigler.


Finally, we examined if paternal age was related to the risk for autism in our cohort. We found very strong effects of advancing paternal age on the risk for autism and related pervasive developmental disorders (Reichenberg et al., in press). Compared to the offspring of fathers aged 30 years or younger, the risk was tripled for offspring of fathers in their forties and was increased fivefold when paternal age was >50 years. Together, these studies provide strong and convergent support for the hypothesis that later paternal age can influence neural functioning. The translational animal model offers the opportunity to identify candidate genes and epigenetic mechanisms that may explain the association of cognitive functioning with advancing paternal age.