Laws of Biology Find the Sperm Mutate Far More Than Eggs

Roni Rabin New York Times February 15, 2007
"Even grandchildren may be at greater risk for some conditions that are not expressed in the daughter of an older father, according to the American College of Medical Genetics. These include Duchenne muscular dystrophy, some types of hemophilia and fragile-X syndrome.

A recent study on autism attracted attention because of its striking findings about a perplexing disorder. Researchers analyzed a large Israeli military database to determine whether there was a correlation between paternal age and the incidence of autism and related disorders. It found that children of men who became a father at 40 or older were 5.75 times as likely to have an autism disorder as those whose fathers were younger than 30.
''Until now, the dominant view has been, 'Blame it on the mother,' '' said Dr. Avi Reichenberg, the lead author of the study, published in September in The Archives of General Psychiatry. ''But we found a dose-response relationship: the older the father, the higher the risk. We think there is a biological mechanism that is linked to aging fathers.''
The study controlled for the age of the mother, the child's year of birth and socioeconomic factors, but researchers did not have information about autistic traits in the parents.
A study on schizophrenia found that the risk of illness was doubled among children of fathers in their late 40s when compared with children of fathers under 25, and increased almost threefold in children born to fathers 50 and older. This study was also carried out in Israel, which maintains the kind of large centralized health databases required for such research. In this case, the researchers used a registry of 87,907 births in Jerusalem between 1964 and 1976, and linked the records with an Israeli psychiatric registry.
Researchers controlled for the age of the mother but did not have information on family psychiatric history."



This statement of Michael Wigler's is not true! Either he hasn't studied this subject or he is misleading the newsires. The opposite is true.


"Almost all cases [of spontaneous mutations] happen in the mother and are transmitted by the mother," he said, adding that the trait for Down is transmitted at the moment of conception. The trait is not hereditary in the same sense a "disease gene" is transmitted from one generation to the next. "