Last month U California at Davis found a "cluster" of autism which would tend to contradict their most recent research revelation published in Autism Research (AR). “This is the first time that anyone has looked at the geography of autism births in California in order to see whether there might be some local patches of elevated environmental risk. This method ignores unknown widespread factors (such as a regional pollutant) that could increase autism incidence,” said Karla Van Meter, the study’s lead author. Van Meter is an epidemiologist and was a doctoral student in the UC Davis Department of Public Health Sciences and at the Center for Animal Disease Modeling and Surveillance when the study was conducted." (UCD)
“In the U.S., the children of older, white and highly educated parents are more likely to receive a diagnosis of autism or autism spectrum disorder. For this reason, the clusters we found are probably not a result of a common environmental exposure. Instead, the differences in education, age and ethnicity of parents comparing births in the cluster versus those outside the cluster were striking enough to explain the clusters of autism cases,” Hertz-Picciotto said."It let's dad's off the hook no matter how old he is, daddys not to blame. It's all on the mommy! Ignoring the fact that most of the Defeat Autism Now (DAN) blogs are mother run. This type of research will certainly not sit well with the blogsphere. We'll sit on the sidelines and wait to see.
“This study challenges a current theory in autism epidemiology that identifies the father’s age as a key factor in increasing the risk of having a child with autism,” said Janie Shelton, the study’s lead author and a doctoral student in the UC Davis Department of Public Health Sciences. “It shows that while maternal age consistently increases the risk of autism, the father's age only contributes an increased risk when the father is older and the mother is under 30 years old. Among mothers over 30, increases in the father's age do not appear to further increase the risk of autism.”Which contradicts CBS News report of the research.
"The new research suggests the father's age appears to make the most difference with young mothers. Among children whose mothers were younger than 25, autism was twice as common when fathers were older than 40 than when dads were in their 20s."Number do matter and while the increase is substantially greater for women older its no "fait accompli." Is it a trade off most women are willing to make? That too is something each individual woman will have to make. Prenatal testing might be a part of that decision making process for older mothers. What it isn't is an indictment of career women or senior motherhood. What it is, might even not be of any concern of most eaders as well. It certainly was on the mind of one particular editor here in our office. He who edits rules!
"Because of the large study size, the researchers were able to show how risk for autism was affected by each parent's age by holding one parent's age constant and then comparing autism incidence across the age of the other parent across five-year increments. The subtle interaction of how each parent's age affects the risk of autism then became quantifiable even when it was reliant on the other parent's age. This methodology is more efficacious and requires fewer assumptions than the mathematical modeling used by earlier studies, the researchers said." (UCD)
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