Studies at the University of Indiana have shown that there
may be a connection between the age of the father during conception and the
risk of the child having autism, schizophrenia, and/or learning disabilities.
Advancing Paternal Age, or APA, has been perceived as a risk to a child’s health
because of the increased likelihood of ‘de novo’ mutations. ‘De novo’ mutations
are mutations specifically introduced into a family by a parent for the first
time in the hereditary line. The University did a study on several Swedish
children over a 28 year period. The study involved many children with siblings
from the same father, (one born in the fathers twenties, and the other in the
forties) to conclude whether the age of the father had a large impact on the child’s
risk of autism, schizophrenia, and intellectual problems. The study concluded
that the children born to older fathers had a higher risk, but several variables
were not taken into account such as if the children were raised in the same
manner or with the same mother. Even with these variables, the University
believes their results are reliable evidence. Read more about the consequences of late parenthood here.
This article proved to be scary to me personally. My four
year old sister’s father, my step-father, was forty four when my sister was born.
Although my sister is a perfectly healthy little girl, the risk was still
terrifying. I believe parents should be very careful in planning when to have
their children.
