Maternal and Paternal Age are Jointly Associated with Childhood Autism in Jamaica.

Autism Dev Disord. 2012 Jan 10. [Epub ahead of print]
Maternal and Paternal Age are Jointly Associated with Childhood Autism in Jamaica.
Rahbar MH, Samms-Vaughan M, Loveland KA, Pearson DA, Bressler J, Chen Z, Ardjomand-Hessabi M, Shakespeare-Pellington S, Grove ML, Beecher C, Bloom K, Boerwinkle E.
SourceDivision of Epidemiology, Human Genetics, and Environmental Sciences (EHGES), School of Public Health, The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston (UTHealth), Houston, TX, 77030, USA, Mohammad.H.Rahbar@uth.tmc.edu.

Abstract
Several studies have reported maternal and paternal age as risk factors for having a child with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), yet the results remain inconsistent. We used data for 68 age- and sex-matched case-control pairs collected from Jamaica. Using Multivariate General Linear Models (MGLM) and controlling for parity, gestational age, and parental education, we found a significant (p < 0.0001) joint effect of parental ages on having children with ASD indicating an adjusted mean paternal age difference between cases and controls of [5.9 years; 95% CI (2.6, 9.1)] and a difference for maternal age of [6.5 years; 95% CI (4.0, 8.9)]. To avoid multicollinearity in logistic regression, we recommend joint modeling of parental ages as a vector of outcome variables using MGLM.

PMID: 22230961 [PubMed - as supplied by publisher]