August 24, 2012: A study headed by Dr. Kari Stefansson, at left, a human geneticist and neurologist at the University of Iceland and the CEO of deCode Genetics in Reykjavik, and published on-line Wednesday in Nature, "buttresses earlier observcations that rates of autism and some other disorders are more prevalent in children born of older fathers, sometimes by a factor of two or more..." according to a story in the Los Angeles Times by Rose Mestel.
Podcast from Nature magazine featuring Dr. Stefansson can be heard here:
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An excerpt from Mestel's article:
...The new research, made possible by recent advances in DNA-sequencing technology, also should help correct an overemphasis on the riskiness of women giving birth at older ages, some researchers said.
Although older mothers are at higher risk for complications such as diabetes?during pregnancy and are more likely to have children with chromosomal disorders such as Down syndrome,?the study found that practically all of the new mutations detected in children came from the father.
And the older the father, the more mutations he passed on....
A man aged 29.7 at the time he fathered a child contributed 63 new mutations on average to his offspring, the authors found, and a man aged 46.2 contributed 126 mutations ? a doubling, the authors calculated.
The paper, as quoted in Nature's press release, concludes that "fathers passes on nearly four times as many ?new mutations as mothers: on average, 55 versus 14. The father's age accounted for nearly all of the variation in the number of new mutations in a child's genome, with the number of new mutations being passed on rising exponentially with paternal age. A 36-year-old will pass on twice as many mutations to his child as a man of 20, and a 70-year-old eight times as many..."
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