ESTIMATED AUTISM RISK, OLDER REPRODUCTIVE AGE, AND PARAMETERIZATION

LETTERS
ESTIMATED AUTISM RISK, OLDER REPRODUCTIVE AGE, AND PARAMETERIZATION
Maureen S. Durkin, PhD, DrPH, Matthew J. Maenner, BS and Craig J. Newschaffer, PhD

Maureen S. Durkin and Matthew J. Maenner are with the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Craig J. Newschaffer is with the School of Public Health, Drexel University, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Correspondence: Correspondence should be send to Maureen S. Durkin, Department of Population Health Sciences, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 789 WARF, 610 Walnut St, Madison, WI 53726 (e-mail: mdurkin@wisc.edu). Reprints can be ordered at http://www.ajph.org by clicking the "Reprints/Eprints" link.



Because this article has no abstract, we have provided an extract of the first 100 words of the full text and any section headings.




In their recent article, King et al.1 seemed to dismiss the conclusion supported by previous epidemiologic studies (including 1 authored by us)2,3 that increasing maternal age and paternal age are both independently associated with autism risk. Based on their analysis of California Department of Disabilities Services (DDS) data, King et al. argued that the previously observed paternal age effect is an artifact of pooling data across successive birth cohorts during a period in which both the prevalence of children receiving services for autism and the proportion of births to older parents have increased, essentially asserting that observed paternal age effects .