Men who have children after the age of 50 have almost double the risk of having a grandchild being diagnosed with autism. Autism is known to cause a combination of genetic and environmental factors. This study suggests that older grand-paternal age is also a risk factor for autism. Experts think the link with paternal age could be explained by genetic errors creeping into sperm production as men get older.
Writing online in JAMA Psychiatry, researchers used Swedish government data on parental and grandparental ages of 5,936 children with autism, comparing them with more than 30,000 children without autism. They found that compared with men who had a child when they were 20 to 24, those who became fathers when they were 50 or older were about 73 percent more likely to have a grandchild with autism. The connection held even after controlling for other factors, including the age of the grandchild’s parents.
This is a very interesting article. It is very obvious that he age of a parent will effect the chances of producing a child with ADS. However it is surprising to me that if a grandfater had a son at the age of fifty but the son hand a child as young as his 20's then the age of the gradfather still effects this probability.
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