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Autism and older dads
Anti-dork spin: Maybe guys likely to have autistic kids tend not to become dads as early as other guys.
That is from Slate. Here is Steve Levitt on the same. Here is The Washington Post and the effect appears very large indeed.
Addendum: Using bacteria to fight autism. And here is a satirical (?) treatment of the causes of autism.
Posted by Tyler Cowen on September 5, 2006 at 08:01 AM in Science | Permalink
Comments
I've seen a lot of speculation here & on other blogs as to who would be a late-life father. The speculation seems to be about American society. But to make sense, the speculative propensity would have to be a propensity of ISRAELI fathers who marry late, because the whole research project was on Israeli data:
"The research involved about 130,000 Israeli Jews born in the 1980s. Those fathered by older men were almost six times more likely to have autism or related disorders than those fathered by men younger than 30, and more than one and a half times more likely than children fathered by men ages 30-39." -- from the article posted by Yahoo.
Posted by: Mae at Sep 5, 2006 8:50:09 AM
It seems like that conjecture would imply that the last born child has the highest risk of autism. In my experience - very, very limited to two families - both of the autistic children born were first born. I
Posted by: Jason Voorhees at Sep 5, 2006 9:39:26 AM
Jason, that's really good thinking.
It should be trivial, given the data set,
for the researchers to look at siblings.
This would allow them to pin down the genetic
component of late-life dads (i.e. sperm breakdown)
versus the selection component.
If the "bad sperm" theory is true, the younger
siblings should have increasing chances of autism.
If the selection theory is true, then children
born to older dads should have a higher chance of autism
if they have no older siblings.
Finally, if there's some other causal factor,
e.g. first-born children are more likely to have autism
in general for some unexplained reason, then that could
also generate this older-dad finding, because older dads
likely have fewer children, and so a larger percentage
of those kids are first-born.
There's a lot of good follow-up research to be done, here.
If you don't email the authors, I will.
Posted by: Keith at Sep 5, 2006 10:15:58 AM
I think Jason is at least partially right. This finding is most likely correlative I think.
I had always been under the impression that the real cause of higher rates of autism was the "compartmentalization" effect.
http://www.autismtoday.com/articles/Genius_May_Be_Abnormality.htm
Simon Baron-Cohen, an autism researcher at the University of Cambridge, found that there were 2 ½ times as many engineers in the family history of people with autism.
The rising stratification of America by education levels would mean that more smart women are marrying more smart men, and therefore that leads to more kids with autism.
Why would this correlate with older dads? Well, I imagine men who put off their child-bearing days often do so for reasons such as education. Why doesn't it correlate with older mothers? Smart men still like younger women, but want smart younger women.
Posted by: Joel W at Sep 5, 2006 12:35:31 PM
One of the posters at Steve Levitt's blog sited this article about the connection between engineer fathers and autism.
http://www.int-pediatrics.org/PDF/Volume%2017/17-1/pd%2060-61%20mearns.pdf
Posted by: joan at Sep 5, 2006 12:41:20 PM
Given the recent discussions about Silicon Valley type nerds actually being high functioning autistics or aspergers the effect would seem to correlative ratherv than causative. Chicks don't dig geeks until the stock options mature
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