AN EXCELLENT ARTICLE - EVERYONE WHO CARES ABOUT AUTISM SHOULD READ IT THOROUGHLY

February, 2009 in Biology | 0 comments | Post a comment

The Father Factor: How Dad's Age Increases Baby's Risk of Mental Illness
Could becoming a father after age 40 raise the risks that your children will have a mental illness?
By Paul Raeburn



Since then, about 20 inherited ailments have been linked to paternal age, including progeria, the disorder of rapid aging, and Marfan syndrome, a disorder marked by very long arms, legs, fingers and toes, as well as life-threatening heart defects. More recent studies have linked fathers’ age to prostate and other cancers in their children. And in September 2008 researchers linked older fathers to an increased risk of bipolar disorder in their children.

no treatment. The damage done by a schizophrenia-inducing mother was irreparable.

At the same time Eileen was deteriorating, Malaspina earned a master’s in zoology and took a job at a drug company, where she drifted into research on substances that could alter brain chemistry. She was in the job for a while before she made the connection with her sister. “I was looking at molecules in the lab that might be related to psychosis,” she says. “My sister had very bad psychosis.” Researchers were then beginning to establish a biological basis for schizophrenia that would ultimately demolish the so-called schizophrenogenic-mother theory. Malaspina quit her job, went to medical school, became a psychiatrist and focused her research on schizophrenia.

While schizophrenia was being recast as a biological illness, most researchers still looked to mothers as the cause of the illness. A woman’s eggs age as she does, and it seemed reasonable to conclude that they deteriorate over the years, giving rise to increased problems in her offspring. Sperm are freshly manufactured all the time.

That’s not quite the way biology works, however. Because sperm are being continuously manufactured, genetic copying is going on constantly. Geneticists think it is that incessant copying and recopying that gives rise to the genetic errors that cause dwarfism, Marfan syndrome and the other inherited ailments. Malaspina decided to explore whether genetic errors in sperm might be at least partly responsible for schizophrenia. It was an unfashionable line of research. Nobody worried about fathers because everybody assumed mothers were the source of most problems in children. But Malaspina and others were beginning to think about it differently.

Schizophrenia and Autism
Later, while doing her residency at Columbia University, Malaspina learned about a unique research opportunity in Israel. During the 1960s and 1970s, all births in and around Jerusalem were recorded in conjunction with information on the infants’ families, including the ages of the parents. And all those children received a battery of medical tests as young adults, a requirement of Israel’s military draft. Because the records cover an entire population, the data are free from the biases that might creep in if researchers looked at, say, only people who graduated from college or only those who went to see a doctor.


Malaspina used the Israeli group to look first at the risk of schizophrenia in children of older fathers—and then at the risk of autism. Then she correlated birth and family information on some 90,000 children with information on which of them had developed schizophrenia as recorded on their military physicals. In 2001 Malaspina and her colleagues reported that paternal age was strongly linked to the risk of schizophrenia, as she had suspected.

It was the first large-scale study to link sporadic cases of schizophrenia to fathers’ age, and few researchers believed it. “We were absolutely convinced it was real, but other people didn’t think it was,” Malaspina says. “Everybody thought men who waited to have children must be different.” That is, maybe these older fathers had some of the makings of schizophrenia themselves—not enough for the disease to be recognized but enough that it took them a little longer to get settled, married and have children.

Other groups tried to repeat the study using different populations. In all these studies, researchers took a close look at whether there was something about the older fathers—unrelated to age—that increased the risk of schizophrenia in their children. When they did, the link with age became even clearer. “That result has been replicated at least seven times,” says Robert K. Heinssen, chief of the schizophrenia research program at the National Institute of Mental Health (which has funded some of Malaspina’s work). “We’re talking about samples from Scandinavia, cohorts in the United States, Japan. This is not just a finding that pertains to Israeli citizens or people of Jewish background.”

Malaspina knew that the draft-induction tests identified young men and women with autism, and she realized that, too, could be looked at to see whether it was linked to paternal age. “There are similarities between autism and schizophrenia—they both have very severe social deficits,” says one of her collaborators, Abraham Reichenberg, a neuropsychologist at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine and the Institute of Psychiatry at King’s College London. “There was some reason to think similar risk factors might be involved.” In 2006 they and their colleagues published a report showing that the children of men who were 40 or older were nearly six times as likely as the kids of men who were younger than 30 to develop autism or a related disorder.

Autism and related disorders—referred to as autism spectrum disorders—occurred at a rate of six in 10,000 among the children of the younger fathers and 32 in 10,000 among the children of the older fathers. (That is closer to five times the risk, but statistical adjustments showed the risk was actually about six times higher in the offspring of the older dads.) In the children of fathers older than 50, the risk was 52 in 10,000.

That was the study I heard about the day after my son Henry was born.

Reichenberg interprets these results as very solid findings: “In epidemiology, you look for an odds ratio of two. Anything above that, you’re happy. When you have an odds ratio more than five, you’re excited.” The study could not absolutely rule out some effect of older mothers, but “we’re pretty confident that the paternal age risk holds no matter what the maternal age,” he says.

As these studies were being done, Mala­spina asked Jay Gingrich, a psychiatrist and neuroscientist at Columbia who works with mice, whether he could look for the same effect in the offspring of older mouse fathers.

Gingrich can’t ask his mice whether they are suffering delusions or hearing voices. But he can give them tests that people with schizophrenia have difficulty passing. In one such test he looked at how mice reacted when startled by a loud sound. Mice are like people—when they hear a loud noise, they jump. And there is more similarity than that: when mice or people hear a soft sound before being startled, they don’t jump as much. It is called prepulse inhibition; the soft pulse inhibits the reaction to the louder one. “It’s abnormal in a number of neuropsychiatric disorders, including schizophrenia, autism, obsessive-compulsive disorders and some of the others,” Gingrich says. And he found that the response was abnormal in mice with older fathers.

February, 2009 in Biology | 0 comments | Post a comment

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Could becoming a father after age 40 raise the risks that your children will have a mental illness?
By Paul Raeburn

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The results were so striking that Gingrich thought they were too good to be true. He and a postdoctoral researcher, Maria Milekic, collected data on 100 offspring of younger dads and another 100 offspring of older dads before they decided the results were correct.

Missing a Mechanism?
Not everyone agrees on what Malaspina’s results mean. Daniel R. Weinberger, a psychiatrist and schizophrenia expert at the National Institute of Mental Health, for instance, accepts the findings—that the incidence of schizophrenia is higher in the children of older fathers. But he does not agree with Malaspina that this could be one of the most important causes of schizophrenia. The reason, he says, is researchers know too little about which genes conspire to cause schizophrenia: “It’s a seminal observation, but like many seminal observations, it doesn’t identify a mechanism.” Weinberger wants to know exactly how this happens before he can say what it means.

Malaspina has thought a lot about the mechanism. What happens to the sperm of men as they age that could give rise to these increased risks in their offspring? The first thought was a classic kind of genetic mutation—a typo in the DNA, a stutter or some other scramble of the code.

There is, however, another possibility. The genetic code we are familiar with is expressed in the DNA itself. But there is a second genetic code, separate from what is embedded in the DNA. To distinguish it from the genetic code, it is referred to as “epigenetic” information. It is like a bar code imprinted on the outside of a gene. The information in that bar code can turn the gene on or off—sometimes inappropriately. If it turns the wrong genes on or off, it can affect health and disease just as surely as can changes in the DNA itself.

Malaspina has not yet proved it, but she suspects that as men grow older they develop defects in the machinery that stamps this code on the genes. These imprinting defects may give rise to the increased risk of schizophrenia, autism and perhaps some of the other ailments related to paternal age.

It is not possible to poke around in people’s brains to see whether those who have schizophrenia show errors in this imprinting. But that can be done in Gingrich’s mice. He is just now beginning to examine the imprinting in the brain tissue of his mice, and he is betting he will find errors there. That is precisely the kind of research that could address Weinberger’s concerns about the mechanism responsible for increasing the incidence of schizophrenia in the children of older dads.

This research could represent an important advance in understanding schizophrenia and autism. “This is work that we will pursue and fund, because we’re so eager to get the genetics worked out,” says Thomas R. Insel, a psychiatrist and director of the National Institute of Mental Health. “It’s a very interesting observation.” With persistence—and some luck—the research could lead to better treatments or even, one day, a cure for schizophrenia and autism.

Some researchers worry that these new findings are just among the first of the problems that might ultimately be associated with older dads. “If there is one common disease that we know is associated with older biological fathers, we can safely assume there are more remaining to be discovered,” says University of Chicago psychiatrist Elliot S. Gershon.

Gershon’s prediction has already come true. In September 2008 researchers in Sweden, in collaboration with Reichenberg, reported that the children of older fathers had an increased risk of acquiring bipolar disorder. And the risk increased as the fathers’ age rose, encouraging confidence in the results.

For now, prospective parents might want to rethink their plans about when to have children, says Herbert Meltzer, a psychiatrist and widely recognized schizophrenia expert at Vanderbilt University. He believes the risks for children of older fathers will eventually be seen to be as noteworthy as the risks facing older mothers. “It’s going to be more and more of an issue to society,” he notes. “Schizophrenia is a terrible disease, and anything that can be done to reduce it is terribly important.”


Meltzer thinks women should take a man’s age into consideration when choosing a partner to have children with. And men might want to think about having sperm stored when they are young. Because despite the advances in understanding autism and schizophrenia, treatment is limited and difficult, and a cure remains elusive.

His Father's Age Caused Seung-hui Cho's Autism and Schizophrenia

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y9X2NJvDIYM&mode=related&search=


By the age of 38-39 his father's sperm had mutated DNA to cause autism/schizophrenia in this son.
Paternal ages below or above 35 years old are associated with a different risk of schizophrenia in the offspring.

A link between older age of fatherhood and an increased risk of schizophrenia was detected in 1958. Since then, 10 studies attempted to replicate this result with different methods, on samples with different origins, using different age classes. Defining a cut-off at which the risk is significantly increased in the offspring could have an important impact on public health.
Philip Gorwood, MD co-editor of European Psychiatry
THE HEADING IS MINE THE STORY BELOW IS BY ~The Baby Boomer Queen~


Excerpts of the story compiled and written by -The Baby Boomer Queen-


The school files contain only a single sheet of paper on Cho Seung Hui , showing he left the school in August 1992, at age 8, after partially completing second grade.

“We don’t know anything about that student,” said the vice principal, who refused to identify himself. “And I’d like to point out that he did not graduate from here.”

The young Cho Seung Hui left little impression on those he might have met. Sketchy recollections in the South Korean media all emphasize his shyness, a trait that would follow him throughout his life.

“He was a quiet, well-behaved boy,” said Lim Bong-ae, the family’s former landlady.

His grandfather and great-aunt, both in their 80s, still live in Seoul. Though they met Seung-hui only twice, and had not seen him for years when his face appeared on front pages and TV screens last week, they said they remembered him as a troubled boy uncomfortable with affection.

Kim Hyong-shik, his grandfather, recalled “a grandson who was so shy he didn’t even know how to run into my arms to be hugged.”Cho Seung Hui ’s great aunt, Kim Yang-soon, remembered a child who was quiet and strangely remote.

“He was docile and well behaved,” she said. “But his mother used to say he does not speak, that he only looked at her but did not reply to her. And that symptom got worse when they went to America. It was his mother’s greatest heartburning grief that her son did not talk.”


Sat 12 May 2007
Cho Seung Hui background…NO one saw it coming…
Posted by babyboomerqueen under Virgina Tech University , Cho Seung Hui , Topsey Turvey , Day to Day Posts , NEWS FLASH , F.Y.I. , REVENGE

Bright daughter, brooding son:

The enigma in the Cho household…Silent and withdrawn boy was eclipsed by his sister in a culture emphasizing male success. But no one expected what was to come.




Cho Seung Hui , 23, grew up on a quiet cul-de-sac where neighbors waved a friendly hello, but would later say they hardly knew he existed. He attended a mostly white high school that installed round tables in the lunchroom to encourage students to interact, but Cho Seung Hui barely spoke a word. And he was raised in a South Korean family and culture that so values boys his mother once told her employer that she wished her son had attended Princeton instead of her daughter.




Poor, rural roots

Cho Seung Hui ’s parents have always struggled to make ends meet.

Sung-tae Cho, the killer’s father, came from a poor rural area. He was a “country bumpkin” and considerably older than his wife, the daughter of a refugee, said Seung-hui Cho’s great-aunt, Kim Yang-soon. “We practically forced her to get married.”

Hyang-im’s father had fled south during the Korean War that separated the south from its communist northern neighbor, according to Korean news reports.

Sung-tae and Hyang-im Cho were ambitious and apparently educated because after they settled on the still semi-rural outskirts of Seoul, they bought a used-book store. One could make a decent living selling secondhand books in the 1970s, before South Korea’s economy began to boom. But one relative said the bookstore just eked out a profit.

To ease his family’s plight, Sung-tae Cho left his wife behind to be a laborer in the Middle East, working on oil fields and construction sites in Saudi Arabia for most of the 1980s.

Back home, his wife gave birth March 22, 1982, to their daughter, Sun-kyung. On Jan. 18, 1984, Seung-hui was born.



For the first few years of Seung-hui Cho’s life, the family lived in a dark, damp basement apartment on a busy commercial street in Shinchang, a suburb of Seoul. They lived at the bottom of a three-story, red-brick home, and paid $150 a month, a bargain even then.

Cho Seung Hui attended an elementary school a short walk from his home. About 950 students attend today, about half the number when Cho was there. The cluster of three-story buildings frames a large, U-shaped dirt courtyard.

The school files contain only a single sheet of paper on Cho Seung Hui , showing he left the school in August 1992, at age 8, after partially completing second grade.

“We don’t know anything about that student,” said the vice principal, who refused to identify himself. “And I’d like to point out that he did not graduate from here.”

The young Cho Seung Hui left little impression on those he might have met. Sketchy recollections in the South Korean media all emphasize his shyness, a trait that would follow him throughout his life.

“He was a quiet, well-behaved boy,” said Lim Bong-ae, the family’s former landlady.

His grandfather and great-aunt, both in their 80s, still live in Seoul. Though they met Seung-hui only twice, and had not seen him for years when his face appeared on front pages and TV screens last week, they said they remembered him as a troubled boy uncomfortable with affection.

Kim Hyong-shik, his grandfather, recalled “a grandson who was so shy he didn’t even know how to run into my arms to be hugged.”

Cho Seung Hui ’s great aunt, Kim Yang-soon, remembered a child who was quiet and strangely remote.

“He was docile and well behaved,” she said. “But his mother used to say he does not speak, that he only looked at her but did not reply to her. And that symptom got worse when they went to America. It was his mother’s greatest heartburning grief that her son did not talk.”



But Cho Seung Hui ’s future seemed bright. Members of the extended family lived in America. The father’s younger brother persuaded them to join him in the Washington, D.C., region, home to what is believed to be America’s third-largest South Korean population after Los Angeles and New York.



Silence in high school

People on the block are friendly from a distance, but rarely get to know one another. Neighbors say Cho Seung Hui ’s mother would always smile. His father didn’t say much, though once, at his wife’s urging, he cleared the snow from a pregnant woman’s car. Most of the neighbors didn’t know the Chos had a son.

Cho Seung Hui graduated from Westfield High School in 2003. But there is no mention of him in that yearbook, not so much as a senior picture.

The high school, which opened in 2000, is stocked with high achievers. Newsweek magazine once ranked it among the 50 best public high schools in America. Its football team won the state championship the year Cho Seung Hui graduated. But with 1,600 students then, Cho was the odd boy who never spoke, former classmates recalled. He joined the science club but just sat there. He carried around an instrument that earned him the name “Trombone Boy.”

School officials went to some lengths to encourage students to interact. They put round tables in the lunchroom so no one would feel left out. The “Westfield Welcomers” club formed to help wallflowers and outcasts fit in. But none of it seemed to work for the lonely, acne-plagued boy in glasses who was so quiet that some wondered whether he could speak at all.

In an advanced-placement Spanish class, students made recordings to practice for final exams. The teacher brought the tapes in one day and the class begged to hear Cho Seung Hui ’s.

“We wanted to know what his voice sounded like,” said Regan Wilder, a classmate of Cho’s from middle school through college.

“It was almost as if he was backed into a corner whenever you tried to talk to him,” said Patrick Song, a Virginia Tech classmate who took AP calculus with Cho Seung Hui as a Westfield senior. “You took it as like he just wants to be left alone.”

Luice Woo, another senior at Virginia Tech who was in Cho Seung Hui ’s high school calculus class, said: “I thought he was … a recent immigrant who didn’t know English.”

At Virginia Tech, he was the same, though a search warrant revealed that he phoned his family nearly every Sunday night.

Indeed, the profane, rambling diatribe Cho Seung Hui recorded between the shootings, widely broadcast after he ended his rampage with a bullet to his head, may be the most the outside world has ever heard him say.

Sibling differences

While her brother tried to disappear at Westfield High, Sun-kyung Cho was soaring. She’d had offers from Harvard and Princeton and chose the latter because the scholarship was better.

By junior year, Sun, as she came to be called, had developed an interest in global economics. She traveled on an internship to the Thailand-Myanmar border to see factory conditions in a developing country.

The experience was transforming. “They were the most amazing three months of my life,” Sun Cho told the Princeton Weekly Bulletin. The experience launched her career with a firm that works with the Iraq Reconstruction Management Office.


It was Sun Cho, 25, who spoke Friday for her distraught family, issuing a statement that broke four days of silence:

“We are humbled by this darkness…. This is someone that I grew up with and loved. Now I feel like I didn’t know this person,” she said. “He has made the world weep. We are living a nightmare.”


Seung-hui Cho’s father pressed pants six days a week at a dry cleaner in Manassas, Va., west of Washington. Cho’s mother worked at another Korean-run dry-cleaning business in nearby Haymarket.

She pressed men’s suit jackets from 7 a.m. to 3 p.m. six days a week, a small woman maneuvering between hisses of steam and lines of hanging laundry.

“I knew life was hard for her,” said Susana Yang, owner of the dry cleaner. “Her health was not good, and her husband suffered from a back problem.”

Hyang-im Cho finally quit because her arm hurt too much.

“The only time she ever asked for time off from work was to attend her daughter’s graduation from Princeton and to take her son to Virginia Tech,” recalled her employer.

Yang described Hyang-im Cho Seung Hui as diligent and polite, utterly devoted to her children. “She was so proud of her daughter,” she said. But, according to Yang, Hyang-im also said, “I wish it had been my son who was graduating from Princeton instead of my daughter.”



Seung-hui Cho’s mother never discussed her son with Yang. “Whatever burdens she carried, she kept them to herself.”

Yang believes neither parent worked after 2004 because of poor health. When she first heard the identity of the Virginia Tech shooter, she did not immediately connect the name. Then she saw the pictures.

Indeed, rumors spread quickly among South Koreans worldwide that Cho’s father had committed suicide and his mother had overdosed on pills.

The rumors were false. But In-suk Baik, president of the Korean-American Assn. of Northern Virginia, paid a visit to Seung-hui Cho’s uncle in Edgewater, Md. Baik assured him that Americans wouldn’t blame the Korean community for the massacre.

“Because of their upbringing, Korean parents blame themselves for everything that goes wrong with their children,” Baik said. “But in America, people say, ‘Not me.’ “

Family reclusion

Though America’s South Korean American community can be insular, the Chos seemed unusually reclusive. They did not regularly attend church, a center of social activity and networking for many immigrants.

Even more important is the cultural emphasis on education and success. Failures are often viewed as dishonorable.

“Our life is governed by chae-myon, what other people think about us,” said Tong S. Suhr, a Korean American attorney and an unofficial historian of Los Angeles’ Koreatown. “Consulting someone outside the family is admitting that you can’t handle it. It is shameful. So we keep everything to ourselves.”

Chang, of UC Riverside, offered a darker view of the Cho Seung Hui family dynamic.



“The sister epitomized the immigrant success story, while the brother represented its failure,” he said. “Cho Seung Hui was nerdy. Students made fun of him. He was a psycho who needed help. His parents and friends failed in that regard.

Society failed too.”
**************
Thanks to the Times staff writers Wally Roche and Richard B. Schmitt in Washington; Adam Schreck in Blacksburg, Va.; Bruce Wallace and special correspondent Jinna Park in Seoul; and researcher Hugh McCarthy in Blacksburg, Va., who contributed to this report.
***********************************************
What a shame so many lives were touch by tragedy…never to be forgotten.

But the tormented never think of others, only of their dark thoughts. They minds are lost.

~ ~The Baby Boomer Queen~



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