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Fri 22 Oct, 2004 06:29 am
Interesting research reported in New Scientist:
(Full story here:
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99996556 )
Father's age linked to schizophrenia risk
12:43 22 October 04
Children born to older fathers are more likely to develop schizophrenia when they grow up, suggests the largest study of the issue to date.
A team of British and Swedish researchers have shown that for each extra decade in a father's age at the time of his child?s birth, the child is almost 50% more likely to suffer from schizophrenia later in life.
The study of 700,000 people in Sweden suggests that over 15% of the schizophrenia cases in this group could be attributed to the patient having a father aged over 30 at birth.
"This is interesting when you have a society where the age of fathers when they have their first child has increased during the last decade," says Finn Rasmussen at the Karolinska Institute, Stockholm, Sweden, and a member of the team.
Having an older father is believed to increase a child's schizophrenia risk - where there is no family history of the disease - because spontaneous mutations in the father's DNA are more likely to occur in his sperm as he ages. These mutations can contribute to the overall risk of schizophrenia, as well as other diseases, in his children........."
Tony Randalls kids are going to have a lawsuit on their hands!
reminds me that years ago I had a bunch of med pals, one was a female pediatrician, and she told me, re research data, that the worry about being older wasn't all on the women...
whatever, it makes sense that stuff doesn't happen all on one end of things.
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