Published on 12, July, 2020
The article linked below suggests that the children of older parents may be more likely to be autistic. It caught my eye because my dad was almost 50 when I was born and his own father was a similar age when my dad was born.
I’ve always assumed that it just took them longer to have families because they too were autistic (my dad certainly was) but the article suggests that older parents accumulate more mutations which they pass to their children.
Were your parents older when they had you?
https://www.spectrumnews.org/news/link-parental-age-autism-explained/
So.....
A large 2014 study, by the Swedes (they have centralised, very good whole-population data to work with), HINTED that the odds of autism in children, born to fathers of 45 and older, is about 75% higher than fathers in their 20's.
An earlier study from 2010, again from Swedish data, found that fathers over 55 were 4 times more likely to have a child with autism compared with fathers under 30 years old.
There are all manner of other surveys and analysis (I believe the first ever, was the Israeli's in 2006).......and ALL seem to confirm that there is an "increased" chance of autistic kids if fathers are older....and "much increased" chance of the fathers were 50+..
However, if you are so inclined.....and you want to "crunch the numbers" (as I did a while back).....I came to the conclusion [purely for my own clarification]......that, a dad's age has about a 0.03% percent EFFECT on whether they have an autistic child or not.
By all means - shoot me the hell down, all you statisticians out there.......but to me, that means is ain't no biggie?
It’s not clear to me whether age is a cause or merely a correlation - it could be that autistic men just take longer in life to reach fatherhood.
Precisely, oh thinking one. Epigenetics is not to be hailed in too high esteem. There are so many social factors that come into play.